Explanation of Model Provided by Kelly/Maiello Team

THE PRESIDENT'S HOUSE: Freedom and Slavery in Making a New Nation

Dreams of Freedom and Tales of Slavery infused the President's House in the 1790s.

The interpretive program of the Kelly/Maiello and Daniel J. Keating Co. Design Build Team invites Independence National Historical Park visitors to "Listen In" to these narratives, recaptured across the centuries.

At eight distinct locations visitors experience the six substantive themes of the presentation: The House and the People Who Lived there; The Executive Branch of the U. S. Government; The System and Methods of Slavery; African-American Philadelphia, especially free African-American; The Move to Freedom, and History Lost and Found.

As visitors move through the ghost of the building, its architectural fragments reveal the traces of momentous decisions, heart-rending conversations, and the passing details of everyday life and work in a complex human community:

• In sound recordings of dialogues, of ordinary work, of the passing of days, weeks, seasons, and presidential terms;
• In images caught, fleetingly and dramatically, on brilliant LED screens,
• In clear and memorable graphic panels, representing the context of the times;
• And in the cast impressions on the surfaces of artifacts, documents, and ephemera that once shared this space.