National Building Museum

Results: • 476,000 visitors annually • 570,000 online visitors annually • Several thousand social media fans and followers • 35,000 adults and children participate in public and family programs each year • 25,000 students are involved in school programs on site • The Museum hosts three major free public festivals each year cumulatively drawing tens of thousands of visitors: Festival of the Building Arts; Discover Engineering Family Day; and the National Cherry Blossom Festival

Target demographics: The Museum offers something for everyone, from children to design buffs to building professionals. The engaging exhibitions and all-ages programming showcase architecture, engineering, construction, planning, and more.

Geographic areas served: Washington, D.C. and its environs

Programs: Exhibitions:in fiscal year 2017, the national building museum presented eleven exhibitions that examined and interpreted the built environment. The building zone is designed especially for our youngest visitors, ages two to six, and their adult companions and introduces children to the building arts through engaging activities. House and home is a long-term exhibition that takes visitors on a tour of houses both familiar and surprising, through past and present, challenging our ideas about what it means to live at home in america. Exhibitions (continued): play work build takes children and adults alike through an exploration of play with an immersive, hands-on installation featuring molded foam blocks of all shapes and sizes and an original virtual block play experiencecool & collected: recent acquisitions: this exhibition explores the extraordinary objects in the national building museum's collection. These physical pieces of the world we design and build-from the tools that help create it to the toys that help explain it-inspire new perspectives on the built environment and how to improve it. Timber city: this exhibition challenges the notion that wood is an antiquated building material. Timber city demonstrates the many advantages offered by cutting-edge methods of timber construction, including surprising strength, fire resistance, sustainability, and beauty. The landscape architecture of lawrence halprin: lawrence halprin (1916-2009) was one of the most influential landscape architects of the 20th century. Over a career spanning more than five decades, he designed significant projects across the united states and even overseas. The innovative techniques that he pioneered changed the field of landscape architecture forever. Marking the centennial of halprin's birth, this exhibition charted his career from early residential commissions in san francisco to major projects such as seattle's freeway park, the first park built over a freeway. District ii: this poetic visual essay explores the changing streetscape of downtown washington in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s through the urban street photography of bill barrett, chris earnshaw, and joseph mills. The works both reflect and confront each other, providing a sense of the physical and social upheavals experienced by the city in those decades. Architecture of an asylum: st. Elizabeths 1852-2017: this exhibition explored the architecture and landscape architecture of st. Elizabeths. The government hospital for the insane, as the campus was originally named, opened in 1855 as a federally-operated facility. The multi-disciplinary exhibition tells the story of st. Elizabeths' change over time, reflecting evolving theories of how to care for the mentally ill, as well as the later reconfiguration of the campus as a federal workplace and mixed-use urban development. Wright on the walls: this exhibition featured original interpretations of built and unbuilt frank lloyd wright designs created by local artists scott clowney and vlad zabavskiy. Focusing on five areas of wright's work residential, commercial, houses of worship, automobile culture, and decorative details-the interactive space challenges visitors to add their own creative "color" to large-scale drawings printed on the walls, using shades and hues inspired by those used by wright and his studio. Hive: soaring to the uppermost reaches of the museum, hive, designed by acclaimed chicago-based architect jeanne gang of studio gang was built entirely of more than 2,700 wound paper tubes, a construction material that is recyclable, lightweight, and renewable. The tubes varied in size from several inches to 10 feet high and were interlocked to create three dynamic interconnected, domed chambers. Reaching 60 feet tall, the installation's tallest dome featured an oculus over 10 feet in diameter. The tubes feature a reflective silver exterior and vivid magenta interior, created a spectacular visual contrast with the museum's historic nineteenth-century interior and colossal corinthian columns.

education and public programsin fiscal year 2017, the museum's education programs engaged youth, educators, families, and adults in a wide variety of experiences. Schools and teachersmuseum education staff facilitated 593 programs for a total of 13,935 pre-k through 12th grade school children, including 49 free programs to groups from local title 1 schools. In these programs, students explored the processes of building homes, planning a city, engineering, education and public programs (continued): designing buildings, or basic architectural skills. This year also included a new dialogue-based high school program for the special exhibition st. Elizabeths: architecture of an asylum. In addition, 415 students participated in four homeschool days, which featured a range of age-specific architecture, engineering, and design activities. Fifty middle school students from takoma park education campus, school without walls at francis-stevens, and stuart hobson middle school participated in the semester-long multi-visit program city vision, in which they explored d. C. Neighborhoods and worked as teams to develop creative solutions to real community needs through the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning. For the first time, the museum piloted distance learning initiatives for schools, live-streaming interactive programs to classrooms and homeschooling families across the country. 419 students in locations as varied as alabama, pennsylvania, florida, arizona, california, and ontario, canada, participated in a total of 9 programs. Two topics were offered: structural engineering, featuring the museum's historic home, and new wood building technology, featuring the timber city exhibition. The museum engaged with educators in the washington, dc area and nationally in a variety of ways. Three hundred fifty local educators attended the museum's summer educator night. The museum was one of three cultural partners in project zero's children are citizens project which served 8 schools - 27 teachers and 171 students. This included consulting with teachers as they refined lessons related to the built environment for implementation with their students. The museum continued to provide an original professional development experience as part of the national art education association's summer vision week-long program for 25 educators from around the country. This program features 9 dc area museums and involves participants in interdisciplinary, object-based activities to help them transform their teaching, personal artistic practice, and/or understandings about learning. Out of school youth (teens)the museum's signature teen programs continued, while additional programming for teens was added throughout the year. Ninety d. C. Area teens used the built environment to develop skills in critical and creative thinking, problem solving, analysis, evaluation, and teamwork through the museum's landmark programs: design apprenticeship program (fall and spring) and investigating where we live (summer). Youth in the fall 2016 design apprenticeship program worked with the museum as a client to develop public seating. In spring 2017 the design apprenticeship program partnered with the boys & girls clubs of greater washington to design and install a community space next to a clubhouse in the benning neighborhood, integrating visions from clubhouse youth to create the teaching gardens and play spaces. Participants in the investigating we live program talked with local people and artists, took photographs, and curated an exhibition to illustrate the arts and culture of d. C. The exhibition was on view from august 5, 2017 through january 15, 2018. The museum's teen council, a group of twelve youth, met bi-weekly october through may to learn more about careers in museums through behind the scenes access to collections, exhibitions, and programming. They volunteered with family days and planned their own afternoon of creativity for all ages at the museum. About 100 teens attended a new teen night in the summer. Out of school youth (summer camp)twelve 5-day camps were offered in 2017 for 166 children in 3rd-6th grade. One 3-day pilot program was offered for campers in 1st and 2nd grade. Camps for 3rd & 4th included artists and designers, animal architects, engineering marvels, week at the museum, architecture of play, and brick by brick. Camps for 5th and 6th graders included city builder, engineer it build it, architectural encounters, brick by brick, and woodshop for kids. Families and all-ages groupsseven weekend family events served a total of approximately 2,910 people. Events were comprised of workshops and drop in activities. In addition, the annual discover engineering family day in february and the big build family day in october drew 10,815 visitors combined. The museum's hands-on family tool kits were used by 51 museum families. Monthly story time for children under 5 years old and adult companions served a total of 157 visitors. Adultsthe museum presented 61 programs for adult audiences, including lectures, panel discussions, tours and films, serving a total of 6292 adult participants. The museum's high-profile lecture series spotlight on design featured work in clt (cross laminated timber) by shop, lever architects, and arup; the landscape architecture of lawrence halprin and ellen biddle shipman; and david adjaye's work in washington, d. C. The museum's urban salon series took urban adventurers to blue jacket brewery, the tregaron estate, and the roof farm at the university of the district of columbia. Offsite tours provided access to a variety of projects and locations including the museum of the bible, st. Elizabeth's east and west campuses, and the duke ellington school of the arts. In december, the museum presented a special conversation between dr. Ruth westheimer and npr's susan stamburg about westheimer's doll house collection.

marketing and communications:in fiscal year 2017, the national building museum produced a variety of communications that helped meet the museum's mission of inspiring curiosity about the world we design and build. The museum switched website platforms for a simplified and mobile-friendly design in march of 2017. The new site, www. Nbm. Org, saw over 1,411,734 visits since its switch and its pages were accessed approximately 1,558,770 times during that time. The museum experienced strong growth in its social media presence, with increases in network sizes and interactions with constituents across multiple sites. We finished the year with over 28,500 facebook fans; over 23,000 twitter followers; over 23,000 marketing and communications (continued): instagram followers, and over 679,405 video views on youtube. Our direct audience for social media content shares that content with their network, which spreads its reach exponentially. Nbm online, the museum's e-newsletter with an opt-in audience of members and friends, included articles and web links about sustainable urban planning, architecture and design history, youth outreach, and the museum's current exhibitions. Nbm online is e-mailed monthly to a cumulative annual audience of over 800,000. The museum updated and rebranded many of its publications and marketing materials to make them more engaging, effective, and consistent. Through media outreach efforts, the museum's earned media coverage in fy17 had a media value of over $70 million (the cost of reaching the same circulation through paid advertising).