Indiana State Museum: new state-of-the-art facility will attract Hoosiers and out-of-state tourists alike.

• Author: Kaelble, Steve
• Position: Cover Story

Fourth-graders will love studying Indiana after a field trip to the new Indiana State Museum. And their teachers will find the $105 million museum brings the state's history alive in a well-conceived and neatly packaged educational facility.

But there's much more to the downtown Indianapolis museum which opened late last month in White River State Park, It's interactive enough to appeal to kids of all ages, not just those who have to visit for school. There's nostalgia enough to delight seniors. There's a surprising diversity of visual art on display.

And though it's the Indiana State Museum, it's broad-based enough to impress outsiders and boost downtown tourism. For visitors to the state, "this is the best place to start boasts Doug Noble, the museum's CEO.

"We hope this will be not only the first place you'll visit in Indiana, but also the last place you'll leave," adds Ralph Appelbaum, principal of Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the New York-based firm charged with designing the museum's exhibits.

Noble, who took the helm of the museum last year after spending more than two

decades running museums in Memphis, says even the most conservative estimates predict a huge increase in museum attendance, among Hoosiers and outsiders alike.

The former facility, located across downtown in the old Indianapolis City Hall, drew roughly 125,000 visitors a year. By contrast, the new museum is expected to enjoy annual attendance of at least 365,000, perhaps even half a million.

"The primary audience is probably families, and the secondary audience is our traditional audience of schoolchildren. The tertiary audience is out-of-town visitors," Noble says. "We're hoping that, about the first year out, we'll be looking at 20 to 25 percent of the total audience being classified as tourists." In other words, the number of non-Hoosier visitors to the new museum may nearly equal the old museum's total attendance.

Visitors begin to get a feel for Indiana before they even set foot into the museum, because the building itself spotlights Indiana materials, innovations and history, according to Bill Browne, president of Ratio Architects, the Indianapolis firm that designed it. Browne's firm landed its starring role in the project in 1998, when project leaders became disillusioned with the original architect, E. Verner Johnson and Associates, a Boston-based firm that specializes in museum design.

"The original design was not warmly embraced by anybody that I could find,"...