NATIONAL BUILDING MUSEUM ORIENTATION GALLERIES

This new Welcome Center for the National Building Museum seeks to illuminate the impact and scope of the built environment and allow visitors to see the world around them in new ways.

While the museum’s historic architecture impresses visitors with its soaring 75-foot-tall columns, it can also be disorienting and difficult to navigate. The new entry experience provides an essential first touchpoint for visitors, sharing with them the museum's mission and values and directing them to experiences and exhibitions.

The Welcome Center consists of three galleries that introduce visitors to the museum and the sustainable principles it supports, encouraging them to consider their surroundings in new ways. Throughout, displays and interactive elements investigate construction at different scales—infrastructure, public spaces, homes, and landscapes—as well as its impact on everyday life. 

The first of the three galleries provides ticketing services and introduces the core values of the museum. A monumental wall case assembles a vast array of objects—building models, carpentry tools, architectural ornaments, and much more—to convey the diversity and creativity within the museum’s collection. A media table at the center of the second gallery compares the infrastructure of U.S. cities, analyzing population density, mass transit, housing, and other systems. The third gallery allows visitors to experience the physical qualities of the built environment. Innovations of materiality and design that consider an embodied sensorial experience of space. Façades of 24 different buildings, each at 1:1 scale, line the perimeter of the room, highlighting stories of technological innovation and the creative design process.