museum tourist: national building museum

Tagged Under : ,

The National Building Museum is currently hosting an exhibit of Lego models of famous works of architecture. I haven’t been yet, because it costs $5, and I’m waiting for a time when I’m in the neighborhood with one of my parents – they’re members of the museum and can get in the exhibit for free. I swear when they first posted that exhibit, there was one day a month when it was free, but that information disappeared from the webpage long ago.

Anyway, I was cutting through the museum on the way to my bank the other day and saw this:

I didn’t look that closely – I just saw a big red box. It was only on the way back I realized it’s a Lego model of the museum itself!

The museum is in a beautiful building, which is used for inaugural balls and lots of other fancy events. It was built in the 1880s to house the U.S. Pension Bureau. It’s definitely worth a visit. The space itself is stunning, even more so because it’s tucked in a big square brick building, and they have exhibits about things you wouldn’t necessarily think were all that cool, like parking garages, or rest stops along Norwegian highways.

Here’s the inside:

Here’s what the actual inside of the museum looks like, for comparison:

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Comments:

Post a comment

About Helen Fields

I'm a freelance writer living in Washington, D.C. I like to knit,sing, dance, and write about science. Only one of these pays the bills. A few years ago I spent six weeks on an icebreaker in the Bering Sea and two months in Berlin on a journalism fellowship, and who knows - I could find some more adventures sometime.