Adopt an Artifact: Daniel Feil Drafting Tools
If you’ve flown through Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport or attended an event at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, you’ve experienced the work of renowned architect…
Les Halles Reimagined: An Unbuilt Proposal
The Proposal for Les Halles The National Building Museum Collections team recently catalogued and digitized a 1970s collection of architectural sketches and drawings by architect John Blatteau for a proposed…
New Acquisitions: 2024, Part 2
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…
D.C.’s Grand Streets, Past and Present
When Pierre L’Enfant laid out his grand plan for the nation’s capital in 1791, he imagined a new kind of American city: an orderly grid punctuated by broad avenues that…
Adopt an Artifact: Northwestern Terra Cotta Collection
The National Building Museum’s Northwestern Terra Cotta collection is one of the largest and most sophisticated of its kind in the United States, comprised of more than 64,000 architectural drawings…
A Tail Through Time: Dogs in the Museum’s Collection
Each year, the unique bond between human and dog is celebrated by observing National Dog Day on August 26. Though the official holiday was founded in 2004 by animal behaviorist…
Behind the Photographs: The Wurts Brothers Collection
The National Building Museum’s collections are estimated at more than half a million items. The largest material type (by quantity, not by size!) are photographic materials: prints, negatives, transparencies, slides,…
Adopt an Artifact: Architectural Toy Collection
George Wetzel began collecting building toys in the early 1980s after noticing that the toys he was buying for his children were strikingly different in both material and style from…
New Acquisitions: 2024, Part 1
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…