Reputation
“Ralph Appelbaum doesn't work in the field of museum exhibition design. He practically owns it. Architects who do museums have Appelbaum and his 70-person New York firm, Ralph Appelbaum Associates, to thank for making prospects in the field bigger and better. Yet they complain about his increasing boundlessness—he does exhibits, he does interiors, he does architectures—and worry that he's unstoppable. They should worry. Since he opened RAA in 1978, Appelbaum has taken the bobby pin out of the bun, as it were, and made museums sexy again. He has been particularly successful jazzing up museums of science, history and culture—the kind of dowdy old burgs that through the 1970s were dying slow deaths in the backwaters of popular life. Over the past two decades, those same institutions have become tourist destinations for millions of people, who then spend billions of dollars in surrounding communities. Appelbaum has had much to do with that renaissance. He became the go-to guy for museum design not so much as a designer but as a dramaturge. By mixing the didactic material of museums with a good story line and a lot of flashy modern hardware, he all but invented "edutainment." – Bradford A. McKee, 'What's a Museum: What he says it is. How Ralph Appelbaum built a monopoly in the field of exhibition design. Architecture Magazine, 2002”
When Appelbaum was awarded the first National Design Award for Communications by the Smithsonian, the Cooper-Hewitt commented, “His work is not without its detractors. Some believe he has contributed to a diminution of the museum, from temple to forum. Certainly, Appelbaum has helped to bring the museum into open view in our society.
(Against that criticism, although his 'edutainment' is not missing, one of his best known commissions, The Holocaust Museum, clearly does evoke the experience of a shrine or a temple for the martyrs.)
They have had a well-known struggle to find art museums willing to commission their work. Notably, Roberta Smith in the New York Times panned work done by the firm at the Whitney Museum for an Edward Hopper show.
Read more about this topic: Ralph Appelbaum Associates
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