A progression

There are currently three exhibits at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, that give attendees the opportunity to develop an integrative progression of space/place.

The first exhibit I would recommend you walk through is Envisioning Architecture: Drawings from The Museum of Modern Art NY. This exhibit runs through 20 June 2004, and is a plethora of ideas on medium (the vast number of visions ends up dwarfing the number that have actually been completed).

Drawings by more than 60 architects—including Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, Aldo Rossi, Rem Koolhas and Zaha Hadid—which have been integral to the development of modern architecture over the last 100 years and are striking achievements of the hand and eye.

With visions of gingerbread houses in your mind, take a walk over to DC Builds: The Anacostia Waterfront, which runs through 6 June, 2004.

The complex story of the Anacostia River: its ecology, its life as a working river and built environment, and current efforts to restore it as a place of beauty and civic potential.

This is the story of a city, a river's meandering history, and a new vision that is being built, today. The layout of the program helps connect the history, current vision and reality.

[At this point you may want to wander through the one room exhibit on the creation of the Lincoln Memorial, if you haven't already seen it. In a room no larger than a closet you get the history, context, sketches, and scale model of this monument, culminating with a few of the major civil rights events that the monument "inspired." This is a permanent installation.]

Then end your mini vision-to-reality tour with Affordable Housing: Designing An American Asset, running through 8 August, 2004.

Focuses on affordable housing projects from across the nation and in a range of urban and rural settings. The 18 projects illustrated demonstrate that well designed developments can offer new opportunities for the least wealthy Americans while creating real value as assets for their surrounding communities.

This exhibit is a bit too long / unstructured, but offers a strong conclusion to the tour by presenting the history of an idea, examples of questionable implementations, and a large number of today's solutions.

If you want a nice review of one of the exhibits, check out this month's Metropolis for Witold Rybczynski on "Affordable Housing".