New Yorkers can take the subway to Coney Island and Angelenos can cool off in Venice or Santa Monica, but Washingtonians are out of luck if they want to hit the beach—the shore is a three-hour drive away. Alex Mustonen and Daniel Arsham, partners of the New York design studio Snarkitecture, thought that Washington, D.C. could use a beach of its own. So they created one inside the National Building Museum, filling a giant pit with almost a million plastic balls that visitors can float on or swim through. The pit, which opened on the Fourth of July, is fronted

Painted by James McNeill Whistler in the 1870s, the Peacock Room, on display in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is one of the most celebrated interiors in history. Decorations in teal and gold swirl over every surface—even the ceiling and shutters. Now, in a twist worthy of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the Peacock Room has acquired a doppelganger. New York-based artist Darren Waterston has made a full-scale, warped replica of Whistler’s masterpiece, with broken shelves, smashed pottery, and gold paint pooled on the floor. This dark homage, called “Filthy Lucre,” is the heart of a larger

SmithGroup will adapt and renovate a former 1920s refrigeration warehouse for the 430,000-square-foot Museum of the Bible, scheduled to open in October 2017 in Washington, D.C. If the founders of the incipient Museum of the Bible had asked Frank Gehry to represent the parting of the Red Sea in billows of metal and glass, it might have been the least controversial thing about the project, which broke ground last week two blocks south of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The 430,000-square-foot, $400 million museum was dreamed up by Oklahoma’s Green family, owners of the Hobby Lobby craft-store chain, who

The Dutch architecture firm and the Philadelphia landscape architects won the unanimous support of the jury with their X-shaped, densely-programmed design. On October 15, OMA + OLIN was named the winner of the design competition for 11th Street Bridge Park, a planned linear park spanning Washington, D.C.’s Anacostia River that has been widely compared to the High Line and could open in 2018. Selected from four finalist teams, the team comprised of the Dutch architecture firm and the Philadelphia landscape architects won the unanimous support of the jury with their bold, X-shaped design—the most iconic in form, and also the

Balmori Associates' and Cooper, Robertson & Partners' proposal. Last week, the 11th Street Bridge Park unveiled four finalist design concepts for a proposed linear park to be built on the piers of an old highway bridge spanning the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C. The finalist teams in the design competition, which attracted more than 40 entrants, are: Balmori Associates / Cooper, Robertson & Partners; OLIN / OMA; Stoss Landscape Urbanism / Höweler + Yoon Architecture; and Wallace Roberts & Todd (WRT) / NEXT Architects / Magnusson Klemencic Associates.Competition organizers urged the designers to create an active, multi-use public space, and

According to the presentation given at the National Planning Commission Meeting on Thursday, Gehry's new design does not include the east and west tapestries. At its monthly meeting on September 4, the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) heard an update on Frank Gehry’s embattled design for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C. Craig Webb of Gehry Partners presented a revised design with significant differences from the one the commission rejected, by a vote of 7 to 3, back in April. Two of the three metal tapestries that formed Gehry’s most distinctive architectural move are gone. There are now

At 57 feet square and 18 feet high, the maze occupies the eastern third of the National Building Museum's Great Hall.  The vast Great Hall of the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., is as tricky to program as it is impressive to behold. More than 300 feet long and several stories high, the Renaissance Revival hall is often rented out for private events, and its columns and arcades provide a suitably grand backdrop during gala dinners. But the space tends to swallow up lectures and other small-scale public programs. To make better use of it, the museum installed

The International Hurricane Research Center in Miami features 12, six-foot tall fans—a virtual Wall of Wind—capable of simulating Category 5 hurricanes to test the performance of structures and materials. In the weeks before the exhibition Designing for Disaster opened on May 11 at Washington, D.C.’s National Building Museum, a wildfire in Oklahoma forced 1,000 people to evacuate and tornadoes ripped through the South and Midwest, killing 34 people. In the U.S., the threat of natural disaster is always with us. As the exhibition (open through August 2, 2015) makes clear, our strategies for preventing disasters and lessening their impacts have

Our third annual Good Design Is Good Business Lifetime Achievement Award was presented at the American Architectural Foundation's Accent on Architecture Gala in Washington, D.C. Photo © David Hathcox Todd DeGarmo, CEO of STUDIOS Architecture, and 18 of the firm's principals, accept Architectural Record's Good Design is Good Business Lifetime achievement architecture award on April 24. On the night of April 24, at a black-tie event in Washington, D.C., the principals of STUDIOS Architecture came up to the stage—and they just kept coming. The firm had flown in all 18 of its principals, from as far afield as Paris and