As part of our pre-departure staycation my super amazing wife and I went to the National Building Museum. It was alright.

The National Building Museum had been on our list for a while. It got in our heads at some point we should go (I first found out about it years ago when I stumbled across Bantam King ramen, the best ramen shop in DC, and looked across the way to see the museum), but we had never gone because it costs money and neither of us were too sure we were actually all that into buildings. But since we were leaving the country for the forseeable future it was time to see the things we hadn’t seen, and the Building Museum was on the list.

When you enter the museum, man is it impressive. It is certainly a building, I can tell you that. It was originally built for the National Pension Bureau. I was unclear while I was wandering around the museum why the Pension Bureau needed a whole lot of empty space instead of like, offices, but now that I am reading the museum website the space was meant to be large and grand so they could hold large and grand events inside like Presidential Inaugural Balls. Dual-use architecture, nice. As is so often the case the picture just doesn’t do it justice. Those columns are massive. Biggest I’ve ever seen, and I have seen some columns. This huge middle space makes the rest of the museum seem small in comparison.

That was sorta the thing with the museum. It just didn’t feel like there was a whole lot of there there? I don’t know what I was expecting. The exhibits didn’t feel too meaty. There was one very nice one about animals being used in architecture, with a lot of neat items like the below bitumen molds for plaster ornaments. There were also multiple rooms full of legos at the time that kids could use to build buildings out of, but neither my super amazing wife nor I felt like shoving kids out of the way so we could play on legos. The museum had opened with a sort of conceptual gallery of different types of urbanism I guess (the above samples of different granites comes from that), and we very much enjoyed a gallery full of photographs of different buildings, but I’m not sure I walked away with a whole lot more knowledge of buildings than I had before? Maybe I didn’t read closely enough. A building museum has to be tough to curate though, like, I guess there are a lot of different ways you could go with that so any which way you go might make someone a bit unsatisfied.

One really cool thing was the art installation they had in that central hall that sometimes hosts balls. It is in that second photo I included in this post, and is called Look Here by Suchi Reddy. The sculpture included a range of polished metal shapes, all very large, hanging around this sorta central platform thingy that you approached via curved ramps. As you wandered the museum you got to see the piece from a lot of different angles, but the best angle was from the platform. Specifically, laying down on one of the large bean bag chair/furniture thingies they had scattered around the platform, which let you look up at the shapes suspended in space and immersed in the grand hall but more importantly were very comfortable and felt like a nice place to take a nap. From that vantage point it felt like the Building Museum was a place meant for dads to take their kids on a hot summer afternoon so they (the dads) can finally get some lay-down time. So a pretty good place then!