The New York Times Previews American Writers Museum

It's not exactly what you might expect from an homage to the liberal arts. Chicago's American Writers Museum, which opens to the public on May 16, has the "rider" of a science center like San Francisco's Exploratorium, or Liberty Science Center. In this Times preview, Andrew Anway, lead designer, says, "One of the things we got asked a lot when we started was whether the museum was going to be an athenaeum, with leather chairs and lots of oak [...] That was something we really wanted to dispel [...] We want people who come here to have different kinds of experiences around literature." Let's start there:

Thoreau had his cabin; Emily Dickinson had her bedroom; and now America will have what organizers are saying is the first museum dedicated to the collective accomplishments of the nation’s writers.

But rather than a temple to solitary creation, the nearly 11,000 square feet of galleries — housed on the second floor of an office building on North Michigan Avenue, not far from top tourist draws like the Art Institute and Millennium Park — might be seen as a convivial shared apartment.

Instead of manuscripts and first editions, there are interactive touch screens and high-tech multimedia installations galore, like a mesmerizing "Word Waterfall," in which a wall of densely packed, seemingly random words is revealed, through a constantly looping light projection, to contain resonant literary quotations.

There are also homier touches, like cozy couches in the children's literature gallery and even the occasional smell of cookies, unleashed whenever someone pushes the plaque for Julia Child’s "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," included in an installation called "The Surprise Bookshelf."

The museum, created with nearly $10 million in privately raised money, may not own any artifacts. But it does have one on loan for the next six months: the famous 120-foot scroll on which Jack Kerouac banged out "On the Road."

Read on at New York Times.