Or, where to go if you want to see 24,708,421 museums, give or take.
I recently flew down to Washington, DC for what might turn into a biennial pilgrimage of whirlwind museum visits. In 2007, there was the D.W. Reynolds Visitor Center at Mount Vernon, the International Spy Museum, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the National Postal Museum, and the National Building Museum. This year, 2009, there was the National Museum of American History, the Newseum, the National Archives, the National Museum of Natural History, and — again! — the National Building Museum.
I hope to share many more highlights of my trip, but first let’s talk about the Building Museum, which convinced me to pay a repeat visit despite my time in DC being limited. Since it’s a little under-the-radar, being off the mall, it’s blissfully quiet — your shoes will echo in the stairways. The historic building is gorgeous and the temporary exhibits, the ones that I’ve seen, have all been thoughtfully and skillfully designed.
Green Community was designed by Brooklyn, NY-based firms MATTER (exhibit design and fabrication) and mgmt. design (graphics), with media design by Potion. (Links should all lead to project descriptions for Green Community.) I loved the striking cylinders full of dirt, wood chips, and shredded paper; the swirling pattern of cork on the floor; the clean, crisp lightbox graphics; and the “core drilling” timeline that spanned the length of the room, punctuated by materials like coal and bottle caps. It was a beautiful exhibit.
Update: I wrote a bit more about the exhibition floor in a later post.
House of Cars: Innovation and the Parking Garage is also worth a peak for its fascinating subject matter and clear content hierarchy. House of Cars is about “how the parked car has changed our built environments” and it surveys the early days of parking garages and the mid-century building boom, engineering, innovations, and the future of parking solutions within sustainable city planning.
Each section has its own color, numbered for easy navigation. (Like a parking garage!) The wall graphics and reading rails are densely packed with old photographs and architectural drawings, but the gridular layout keeps it all neat. I liked the metal structures that the graphics are mounted on; a touch of parking garage chic.
I managed to take only a few photos of the exhibit while attempting to dodge the hyper-vigilant docent (“no photography, please!!”); I present them to you now.
Post updated in January 2021, and combined with another post about the National Building Museum, dated November 26, 2009. Broken links have been fixed or replaced. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 9 November 2009.