As part of its mission to inspire curiosity about the world we design and build, the National Building Museum actively collects objects, photographs, and paper materials that document the building process. This wide-ranging scope includes pieces of buildings, architectural toys, construction tools, technical and architectural drawings, building photographs and negatives, and souvenir buildings, among many others. In the first half of 2026, the Museum accepted into its permanent collection the following pieces:
Donor: Patricia Sully
This Sears store playset, originally sold in the early 1960s, was owned by Patricia Sully. She played with the set often as a girl in Missouri, and though the original instruction sheet is well-worn, all pieces except one are in excellent condition and remain with the set. It includes a scale model of a two-story Sears department store, movable merchandise counters, small plastic figures of shoppers and employees, and plastic model cars for the parking lot and automotive center.
This playset complements both the Museum’s Architectural Toys Collection and its collections focused on midcentury department stores, including the S.H. Kress & Company Collection and the Business Archives Collection, which feature materials from the Woolworth Archives.
Donor: Maureen Joseph
Maureen Joseph purchased this toy set in 1993 from an antique store in Virginia as a gift for her woodworking husband. It was only lightly used by the Josephs and is in good condition. It contains child-sized carpentry tools such as a hammer, a plane, a protractor ruler, a square, and a saw (among others).
Donor: Bryce Hartman
Bryce Hartman is the Eastern Regional Sales Director for Formica, Inc. and a hobby collector of the laminate material the company is so famous for. While examining his personal holdings to build out the company’s archives with their Brand Historian, Bryce discovered this sample set of three historic laminate samples that are rare examples of some of Formica’s earliest offerings dating to 1927. They are composed of the original Bakelite material used by the Formica company.
This donation builds on previous donations from Bollock Enterprises, Inc. and Formica, Inc. These samples fill gaps in these previous Formica donations, providing context to the brand’s iconic history and bringing the Museum’s collection closer to full comprehensiveness.
Donor: New York City Parks
Orchard Beach Bathhouse Pavilion, a national landmark in Pelham Bay Park in New York City, recently underwent restoration work. Several original fragments were donated to the Museum this year as examples of the iconic craftsmanship of a national landmark building. Two of the fragments feature distinctive blue-glazed terra cotta decorative material, and one represents the building’s unique terrazzo flooring. The pavilion was constructed between 1934-1937, with Aymar Embury as a primary architect, under the direction of Robert Moses.
Donor: Jacquelyn Easley
New Multiple Dwellings No. 2, a booklet featuring renderings and floor plans of several types of residential housing, was gifted to the Museum by Jacquelyn Easley. She inherited the booklet from her father’s estate. The booklet was produced by the Boise-Payette Lumber Company, which was formed through the merging of the Minnesota-based Payette Lumber & Manufacturing Company with the Boise Basin-based Barber Lumber in 1913. In 1957, Boise-Payette merged with Cascade Lumber to form the Boise Cascade Corporation, one of the world’s largest forest product companies.
Donor: Christine Williams
Christine Williams donated seventeen Plasticville sets and several associated accessories. The sets were purchased by Christine’s father, Michael Monaco, as a teenager using money he earned doing odd jobs in the 1950s. These Plasticville playsets join the Museum’s Architectural Toys Collection, which focuses on documenting and understanding how children learn about construction, physics, engineering, decorative arts, and architecture through play. Christine’s donation includes, but is not limited to, sets of a gas station, a post office (pictured), a five-and-dime store, a hospital, a fire department, and an airport hangar.
Donor: John Zukowsky
John Zukowsky, a former architectural archivist and curator of architecture at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1978-2004, donated four architectural fragments. John personally collected each piece as an active member of the architectural preservation field in the Chicago area. Included in the donation are fragments of terra cotta decorative material from buildings in Chicago and a piece of an exterior frieze from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Dana-Thomas House.
The Museum is extremely grateful to these generous donors for working with us to inspire curiosity about the world we design and build. To learn more about the Museum’s permanent collection, search our online database here!