Cityscapes Revealed: Highlights from the Collection

National Building Museum
Washington, DC
This first-ever retrospective exhibition of the National Building Museum’s unique collection explores quintessentially American, 20th-century buildings from center-city mansions to main street storefronts and sleek downtown skyscrapers. Anchored by a series of large architectural elements, this walking tour of the cityscape is complemented by exquisitely detailed drawings; rare, early-20th-century photographs; and smaller-scale fragments from National Historic Landmarks—including the former U.S. Pension Building, the Museum’s extraordinary home.

Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s

National Building Museum
Washington, DC
Between 1933 and 1940 tens of millions of Americans visited world's fairs in cities across the nation. Designing Tomorrow will explore the modernist spectacles of architecture and design they witnessed -- visions of a brighter future during the worst economic crisis the United States had known. The fairs popularized modern design for the American public and promoted the idea of science and consumerism as salvation from the Great Depression.

Participating architects, eager for new projects at a time when few new buildings were being financed, populated the fairgrounds with an eclectic modern architecture. Pavilions housed innovative and dynamic exhibitions that paid tribute to factory production, technology, and speed. Exhibits forecasted the houses and cities of tomorrow and presented streamlined trains, modern furnishings, television, and talking robots.

A first-of-its-kind exhibition, Designing Tomorrow will feature nearly 200 never-before-assembled artifacts including building models, architectural remnants, drawings, paintings, prints, furniture, an original RCA TRK-12 television, Elektro the Moto- Man robot, and period film footage. The artifacts are drawn from the featured expositions: Chicago, IL—Century of Progress (1933–34); San Diego, CA—California-Pacific International Exposition (1935-1936); Dallas, TX—Texas Centennial Exposition (1936); Cleveland, OH—Great Lakes International Exposition (1936-1937); San Francisco, CA—Golden Gate International Exposition (1939-1940); and New York, NY—New York World's Fair (1939-1940).