Adolf Cluss and the Sumner School

The Sumner School

Adolf Cluss, the German born architect, designed over 60 brick buildings built in Washington DC in the second half of the 19th century.  Sadly, only 7 remain today, including the Sumner School (pictured), the Franklin School, the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building and Eastern Market.

The Sumner School, located at 17th and M Streets, NW, has been carefully restored and is carefully maintained as the home of the DC Public School archives, and as a museum with exhibits on Cluss, on the life of Frederick Douglass, and on the history of DC Public Schools, as well as displays of contemporary local artists.

And the building, as well as the exhibits, is worth seeing, inside and out.

Open daily.  And free.

Mystery Statue No. 1

There are hundreds of statues and monuments in Washington.  Most have historical or aesthetic qualities worthy of being displayed in the capital city.  But there are others, scattered here and there, with little or no identification, and certainly no obvious historical significance.  These are the Mystery Statues.

From time to time, I will post a photo of one.  This is the first.

Your job?  To figure out, and let me know, what and where it is.

The Textile Museum

The Textile Museum, located at 2320 S Street, NW, in the Kalorama neighborhood, is open Tuesdays through Sundays, and charges no admission fee ($5 contribution requested).

The Textile Museum

It was founded in 1925 by collector George Hewitt Myers.  Myers had started collecting on a small scale before the turn of the century, but by 1925 had amassed 3100 Asian and African rugs and textiles, and 1500 American textiles.  Today, the museum’s collections include over 18,000 pieces, and with its library and research facilities, the museum has become of international importance.

It is located in two adjoining buildings, with attractive open gardens in the rear.  Visitors enter through the Myers’ house; the galleries are in the building to the right of the house, which Myers bought in 1925 for exhibition purposes.  I find it a very comfortable museum, with very a very friendly staff.

The museum’s website, at http://www.textilemuseum.org, is one of the best.  Not only can you learn about current exhibits, but you can today preview exhibits that have planned through 2011, and review past exhibits from 2000 on.  The two current exhibits are also featured.  One is an exhibit of colorful Amish quilts, mostly drawn from two different Pennsylvania locations, which is accompanied by a 40 minute video on Amish life today.  The second exhibit, in the upstairs galleries, features a number of recent acquisitions, most of which are, to the untrained eye, unique and intricate and colorful.  Thirteen of these new acquisitions can be viewed on the website.

A special exhibit of Indonesian cloths from the collection of President Obama’s mother will be displayed in August, and is sure to be a hit.

The research library is currently closed for renovations (opening in the fall), but the upstairs learning center is operating, with “how to” exhibits, interesting to children and adults alike.

This is a private museum, and not part of the complex of government supported institutions.

John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg (1746 – 1807)

John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg

This statue of Peter Muhlenberg was placed on a pedestal in a small park on Connecticut Avenue and Ellicott Streets, NW, in 1980.  It stands on public land in front of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church.  It is passed daily by thousands, and seen by few.

Muhlenberg was called the “Fighting Pastor”.  Born in Pennsylvania, educated in Philadelphia and Germany, he was ordained both as a Lutheran and Anglican minister, and served congregations in Virginia.  In 1776, he told his congregation that there was a time to pray and a time to fight, and that this was a time to fight.  He left the ministry, and became a Major General in the revolutionary Continental Army, leading a German regiment.

After independence, he became a Pennsylvania representative in the Congress, and in 1801, became a United States Senator.  Resigning from the Senate after only a few months, he moved to Philadelphia, where he became the chief customs officer, a position he held until his death.

The sculptor was Caroline Muhlenberg Hufford of Arlington VA.  Presumably, she was a relative of the Fighting Parson, but I was not able to verify this.  A second statue of Muhlenberg stands in the United States Capitol.

The Four Lions and the Taft Bridge over Rock Creek Park

Sculptor Roland Hinton Perry’s four lions frame the Taft Bridge, which takes Connecticut Avenue over Rock Creek Park.  Perry also sculpted the Neptune fountain in front of the Library of Congress.

The construction of this bridge made possible the development of Connecticut Avenue.  Construction began in 1897; the bridge was completed in 1907.  It was, at the time, the largest unreinforced concrete structure in the world.

Originally simply known as the Connecticut Avenue Bridge, it was renamed in 1931 for former President Taft.

In addition to the lions, the bridge is known for its ornate light stands, designed by another Washington sculptor, Ernest Bairstow, who also designed the exterior frescoes on the Lincoln Memorial.

The lions are also sculpted of unreinforced concrete.  Patched from time to time, in the 1990s, it was determined that a complete renovation was needed.  Because of the deterioration of the original lions, this became impossible and new lions were sculpted using molds created from the earlier ones.

The National Building Museum

The National Building Museum, formerly the U.S. Pension Building

The National Building Museum is located at 401 F Street NW, at the entrance to the Judiciary Square Metro station.  Admission is free.

The Great Hall

Perhaps the main reason to go to the National Building Museum is to see the building itself.  Opened in 1887 to house the U.S. Pension Bureau and to provide a place for gala entertainments, the building was designed by General Montgomery C. Meigs, who also designed the American Institute of Architects’ Octagon House, and Georgetown’s Tudor Place.

Meigs modeled the building after two Roman architectural masterpieces, the Palazzo Farrese of Michelangelo (exterior) and the Palazzo della Cancelleria (interior).  The exterior facing contains 15,500,000 bricks (how’s that for a trivial fact?) and measures approximately 400′ by 200′.  It is surrounded by a 1200 frieze showing civil war scenes, designed by sculptor Caspar Buberl.

A small part of the 1200 foot Civil War frieze

The Great Hall is 316′ long and 116′ across, and the highest point of its ceiling is 159′ off the ground.    The pillars are 75′ high, composed of brick and painted to resemble marble.  There are three arcaded floors that wrap above the Great Hall.  The building is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Used for almost a century for various governmental offices, it was first proposed as a building museum by Washington architect Clothiel Woodward Smith in 1967.  In 1980 Congress passed the enabling legislation, and the building was renovated and opened as the National Building Museum in 1997.

The Great Hall was the scene of Grover Cleveland’s inaugural ball.  It has been used, I believe, in every inauguration since then, and houses other functions.  There are rooms are the second level, formerly the suite of offices of the Chief of the Pension Bureau, and quite elegant, that can be rented for private functions.  There are also many activities for children, both in the Great Hall, as well as in a large children’s play area on the first level, which is open while the building is open, and designed for children under the age of eight.

There is a wonderful gift and book shop, specializing in items involving design and architecture.  It is one of the city’s best museum shops.

The heart of the museum, of course, is its exhibition space.  There usually are several exhibitions at any given time, some permanent (or semi-permanent) and others special exhibitions, often touring exhibits.  The facility also provides lectures (often free) or longer symposia.

There are two long term exhibits.

One, titled Cityscapes Revealed, showcases the building art – examples of design, construction methodology and construction materials.  While I did not look at this exhibit when I went to the museum yesterday, I have looked at it earlier, and will do so again before it is scheduled to close at the end of 2010.

The second is entitled Washington: Symbol and City, and I spent quite a bit of time walking through it yesterday and really appreciated what it tries to do, and how it largely succeeds.  The exhibit concentrates on the various elements that make up the city of  Washington, using photographs, artifacts, documents, videos and narratives to provide surprising complete and understandable explanations.  You want to know how the design of the capitol was chosen, how the building was constructed, what happened when the British set fire to it, how it was rebuilt, and extended?  You want to see the history of the Washington Monument, or Lincoln or Jefferson?  Or perhaps the White House?  Or maybe you are more interested in the history of residential Washington, or the retail centers, or the park system.  Or maybe its the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian, Griffiths Stadium, the area universities.  All are there and because Washington does not have a City Museum, this is the place to go to bone up on your Washington history, whether you are here for a week or a lifetime.  This exhibit is scheduled to continue at least through 2011.

I looked at three special exhibits.

Architecture of Authority: Photographs by Richard Ross was the first.  Ross is a Santa Barbara based photographer, whose photographs, oddly selected, I thought, show places, with no people.  The places he chose are those he deemed to be places of authority.  Thus, there are photographs of prisons, and prison camps, and police stations, and interrogation rooms.   But then there is the Iraqi National Assembly hall, and the room where the UN Security Council meets.  And several photos of mosques (none of churches or synagogues).  Interesting photos (especially those of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, as places I am unlikely to see in person), nicely lit and composed, but a little odd, don’t you think?

The second is called Detour: Architecture and Design Along 18 National Tourist Routes in Norway.  This exhibit starts with a 14 minute video showing tourist sites (and tourists) in various parts of Norway, each more beautiful and spectacular than the other.  The scenery itself is worth the price of admission, as they say.  But along these tourist routes, Norway engaged a number of accomplished architects to design tourist friendly stops – some for parking and viewing, some as small information stops or rest rooms – all of very sleek, modern and rustic design.  This is small scale architecture; the large scale is nature’s.

Finally, there is a large exhibit titled Green Community, with much text and photographs, showing how various cities around the world are reinventing themselves to help preserve natural resources.  Transportation, land conservation, technology, waste management, air quality, water conservation.  Not an artistic exhibit, but a very informative and, hopefully, useful one.

There is a small cafe in the museum, run by Firehook Bakery.  You can get something to drink, a pastry, or a sandwich or salad.  Not fancy by any means, with small tables set around one end of  the Great Hall.  Not a bad place to relax, have a cup of coffee or a bottle of water ($1.65 for the water), read a book or a newspaper, and breath in the air of that enormous space.

The tops of the Corinthian columns

Hello world! What this blog is all about……

The average tourist sees only a small part of what Washington and its suburbs have to offer.  The average resident sees less.

And that is too bad, because there is so much to see, and so much of it is either free, or very inexpensive.

The goal of this blog is point out some places that you might otherwise miss and tell you a little about them.  Places that, if you missed them, you would in fact miss something.

My goal is two or three posts per week.  There will be no order to what I write.  But as time goes by, the semblance of a guide-book will have been created, and maybe someone will find it useful.