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ArchDC Winter 2017.qxp_Fall 2017 11/17/17 5:46 PM Page 17

Photo © Alan Karchmer
Aerial view of the National Museum of African American History & Culture,
with the green-roofed entry portico at lower right.

Contemplative Court. Photo © Alan Karchmer Underground history galleries. Photo © Alan Karchmer

Occupying what may be the last major buildable site on Washington’s building’s tripartite form with more than 85,000 square feet of
Mall, the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American exhibition space divided into community galleries at the ground
History and Culture (NMAAHC) strikes a balance between museum level and mezzanine, history galleries beneath, and cultural galleries
and memorial by serving both purposes through a program that in the upper floors.
celebrates culture while recalling the painful history of slavery. Below grade, where the museum’s narrative history begins, are
The NMAAHC rises five stories above ground, with a three- additional floors that house gallery space as well as a cafeteria and
tiered, inverted ziggurat form that evokes the corona, or crown, of theater, accessible via a monumental stair or equally impressive
a West African caryatid (figural) column, angled to match the 17- elevator. The slow descent from the museum’s entry to its exhibition
degree slope of the neighboring Washington Monument capstone. galleries begins visitors’ journeys back to the 15th century and the
This corona is wrapped in a sheath of 3,600 bronze-colored panels origin of the transatlantic slave trade. Ramps slowly rise upward
that seem to shift in coloration through the course of the day, and through the exhibition, following a gradual temporal shift to a
at night glow from within thanks to an ornate filigree pattern platform focused on the Civil War and the segregation era (1876–
abstracted from the ironwork made by African-American crafts- 1968), and upward through the Civil Rights movement to the years
people in the antebellum South. beyond 1968. An oculus at ground level allows daylight to pour
Visitors cross a threshold between the Mall and the NMAAHC down into a solemn contemplation room at the history galleries’ exit.
beneath a front porch cantilevered over a reflecting pool. Breezes Opened in September of 2016, the NMAAHC is the result of a
that funnel between the porch and the pool have a cooling, calming 2009 competition won by a team led by David Adjaye, Hon. FAIA,
effect to provide a welcoming transition. Dappled daylight filters Phil Freelon, FAIA, and Zena Howard, AIA. The nine-year process
through the metal panel screens to the grand entry hall; at the from conception to completion involved four major architecture
building’s edges, views extend upward, uninterrupted, to the full firms: Adjaye Associates, The Freelon Group, Davis Brody Bond,
130-foot height. Portals that cut through the corona offer framed and SmithGroupJJR. The project was previously featured in the
views of the White House, the Washington Monument, the Capitol, Spring 2017 issue of ARCHITECTUREDC.
the Martin Luther King, Jr., and Lincoln Memorials, and panoramic
vistas of the Mall. Programmatically, the museum echoes its
INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY 17