Gumbo was visiting the National Building Museum in Washington D.C. No one solved where we were visiting this week, but we’ve a new puzzle starting tomorrow so better luck with that one.
The National Building Museum was created by an act of Congress in 1980 and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1985. Construction of this Renaissance Revival architecture building began in 1882 and was completed in 1887. It was originally the Pension Building and housed the U.S. Pension Bureau which closed in 1930 when it transferred its functions to the Veterans Administration. When I toured the Commissioner of Pensions’ offices, all that remained were the fireplace, a large mirror, and a decorative ceiling.
The museum is dedicated to examining the role of architecture, construction, design, engineering, landscaping, and urban planning in our culture. The museum hosts various temporary exhibits in galleries around the spacious Great Hall.
The day of my visit the exhibitions included “Architecture of an Asylum” and “Cool and Collected: Recent Acquisitions,” but neither exhibit allowed photography. Also, that same day the Great Hall was a ticket only entrance for what seemed to be a thicket of sales stalls for crafted items. A few of the side rooms displayed some local artwork.
The architect and engineer responsible for creating this brick masterpiece was Montgomery Meigs, a Quartermaster General who was in charge of provisions during the American Civil War. He was also one of the principal architects of Arlington National Cemetery. Though Meigs was a born and raised southerner (Augusta, Georgia), he strongly opposed secession and remained loyal to the Union. Meigs had traveled to Italy and drew design inspiration from Italian Renaissance palaces for the building’s decorative style and details.
Civil War sculptures and friezes are prominent inside and outside the building. The 1,200 foot long and 3 foot high terra cotta exterior frieze was designed by the Bohemian sculptor Casper Buberl and depicts the continuous parade of Union forces during the Civil War. Inside friezes also depicted war scenes and another seems to replicate the Horsemen Frieze of the Parthenon. Meigs’s correspondence with Buberl reveals that Meigs insisted that a black teamster, who “must be a negro, a plantation slave, freed by war”, be included in the quartermaster panel. This figure was ultimately to assume a central position, over the building’s west entrance.
At a final cost of $886,000, the structure was the largest brick building in the world, comprised of over 15 million bricks with a Great Hall approximately 15 stories high. High above the Great Hall are 235 busts (some say 244) each in their own niche. Each bust represents brick layers, architects, construction workers, architects, financiers, engineers, craftsmen, and developers. Because the building would house pension records, the building had to be fireproof so Meigs chose brick construction and because of the Great Chicago Fire chose terra cotta as a another fireproof material.
The giant 75-foot columns were constructed of brick, like the rest of the building, and crowned by molded plaster Corinthian capitals. Each column required 70,000 bricks. Though Meigs wanted to face the columns in marble, budgetary constraints resulted in a simpler plaster finish, originally whitewashed and later (1895) painted to resemble Siena marble. Meigs designed the columns to be hollow so countless government documents that Meigs thought “will be interesting to the historians or the antiquarians of the age when the ruins of this building…shall be opened to the curious.”
One curiosity for which I could not readily find and answer, was that the 76 original golden terra cotta urns all went missing around 1920, but when one was discovered being used as a birdbath, a cast was made and the urns were recreated. An interesting yet functional design was the rack supported by metal brackets that you can see in my photo just below the windows. These were document tracks that moved baskets of up to 125 lbs. of documents around the offices and floors.
Windows and “missing” bricks created ventilation air intake methods to bring in fresh air. Boundary markers designed by local sculptor Raymond Kaskey stand at each corner of the block and the design was based on an urn sitting on a tripod that Meigs designed for the west chimney. The National Building Museum collects all sorts of things you might not expect. Materials in storage include approximately 75,000 photographic images, 68,000 architectural prints and drawings, 100 linear feet of documents and 4,500 objects, including material samples, architectural fragments, and building toys.
