RSS FeedHistory on Foot: National Building Museum
One of the largest and most impressive buildings in our neighborhood, The National Building Museum (401 F St., NW) has a long history of grandeur in our city.
Thanks to the history provided on the museum’s web site, here is insight into the building’s past:
The National Building Museum is America’s leading cultural institution devoted to the history and impact of the built environment.
Built between 1882 and 1887, the project began following a Senate Appropriations Committee approval of $250,000 to purchase a suitable site and construct a fireproof building for the U.S. Pension Bureau’s headquarters. U.S. Army Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs was appointed as both the architect and engineer for the building. The building was Meigs’ last and most important architectural work and the one of which he was most proud.
The building was designed for two distinct functions: to house the Pension Bureau and to provide a suitably grand space for Washington’s social and political functions. The design was inspired by two Roman palaces. The exterior is modeled closely on the brick, monumentally-scaled Palazzo Farnese, completed to Michelangelo’s specifications in 1589. The building’s interior, with its open, arcaded galleries surrounding a central hall, is reminiscent of the early-sixteenth-century Palazzo della Cancelleria. For the colossal Corinthian columns that divide the Great Hall, Meigs took his inspiration from the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Rome built by Michelangelo in the mid-sixteenth century.
The Pension Building continued to serve as office space for a variety of government tenants through the 1960s. In 1969, the Pension Building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Congress passed a resolution in 1978 calling for the preservation of the building as a national treasure, and a 1980 Act of Congress mandated the creation of the National Building Museum as a private, nonprofit educational institution.
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