WWII museum expanding

NEW ORLEANS – The National World War II Museum here is undergoing a $300 million expansion across the street from the original location.

Set to be completed by 2015, the project will include a campus of six new buildings covering 5.7 acres. It will quadruple the size of the original museum, which opened in 2000.

The first buildings to open on the site – in the summer of 2009 – will be the Stage Door Canteen, a bistro and performance space, and the Victory Theater, offering a futuristic multi-sensory cinematic show, executive produced by Tom Hanks.

If the state of Louisiana comes through with a requested $26.5 million, the next phase of construction could begin immediately: the Campaigns Pavilion, which will explore battle sites that go beyond the D-Day landings in Europe and the Pacific covered in the original museum.

Another building will hold macro artifacts from World War II such as planes, tanks and ships. The Liberation Pavilion will explore advances in human rights and technology that resulted from the war, as well as a display on the Holocaust, with a special installation on Anne Frank.

And the Freedom Pavilion, a replica of a 1940s train station, will offer a virtual tour through war-era America and a dogtag for every visitor, imbedded with the story of an authentic soldier whose wartime story the visitor follows.

In planning the expansion, the designers have kept in mind that their mission is to appeal to a young audience, to prevent the museum from becoming obsolete as the ranks of World War II veterans grow thin.

The design favors a generous use of avant-garde technological wizardry and an experiential approach, rather than a documentary approach that uses more words and pictures.