NowWashington, D.C.

Architecture

Architecture in Washington, D.C.

Washington was planned before it was built and has spent two centuries filling in a diagram. The height limit pushes everything horizontal, so the arguments here happen in plan and in stone rather than in silhouette.

• National Museum of African American History and Culture

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  Completed 2016

  David Adjaye

  The last museum built on the Mall, on the corner beside the Washington Monument. Adjaye wrapped it in a three-tiered bronze-coloured lattice angled to match the cap of the obelisk, taking the form from Yoruba sculpture and the metalwork from the ironwork of enslaved craftsmen in Charleston and New Orleans. More than half the building is below ground, and the history galleries begin at the bottom. The lattice controls the light and states the subject at the same time.

• Vietnam Veterans Memorial

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  Completed 1982

  Maya Lin

  A memorial to the American dead of the Vietnam war, cut into the ground between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. Lin set two walls of polished black granite into a slope so they meet at an angle, each pointing at one monument, and listed the names by date of death rather than alphabetically. The stone is reflective, so the names are read over the visitor's own face. She submitted the entry as a student, and it was attacked for years before it was understood.

• National Gallery of Art, East Building

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  Completed 1978

  I. M. Pei

  An extension to the National Gallery on the trapezoidal plot where Pennsylvania Avenue meets the Mall. Pei drew a diagonal across the trapezoid and built the two triangles it produced: an isosceles one for the galleries, a right one for the study centre, joined by a skylit court. The geometry runs down into the rooms and the paving. A site everyone had treated as a leftover turned out to dictate the whole plan.

• Hirshhorn Museum

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  Completed 1974

  Gordon Bunshaft

  A museum of modern art on the Mall, built as a concrete cylinder raised on four piers. Bunshaft left the drum almost closed, cutting one long balcony into the north face and lighting the galleries from a glazed inner ring around the courtyard. Circulation is a loop, so the plan has no corners to end a hanging on. It refuses the classical frontage every other building on the Mall accepts, and has been argued about on those grounds since.

• Lincoln Memorial

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  Completed 1922

  Henry Bacon

  A memorial closing the axis that runs west from the Capitol. Bacon used a Greek temple entered on the long side rather than the end, which turns Daniel Chester French's seated figure down the reflecting pool instead of across it. Thirty-six columns stand for the states in the Union at Lincoln's death. Bacon built it as an ending; it has been used as a stage, which is the part of its meaning he did not decide.