The Corona Building
David Adjaye, Philip Freelon and the Freelon Adjaye Bond SmithGroup team · 2012 to 2016
Before you go in, walk around the outside. The building rises in three tiers that widen as they go up, like an inverted pyramid or a crown, and the whole form is wrapped in a lattice of bronze coloured panels. In the morning it looks dark and heavy; when the afternoon sun hits it, it glows amber against the white marble of the Washington Monument next door. The architects called this shape the corona, and it is deliberately unlike the neoclassical stone museums that line the rest of the Mall.
The form comes from a Yoruba wooden column, a caryatid figure carrying a crown, which lead designer David Adjaye chose as a reference to West African art. The lattice recalls the ironwork made by enslaved and free Black craftsmen in Charleston and New Orleans, and the panels are patterned so that about the same amount of light passes through as in the old wrought iron balconies. Look for the places where the lattice opens into large windows, which the architects call lenses; from inside they frame views of the Monument, the White House and the Mall, tying the story inside to the city outside.
More than half of the museum is below ground, which allowed the visible building to stay modest in height beside the Monument. The site itself, the last available plot on the Mall, was chosen after decades of debate, and a law creating the museum was signed in two thousand and three. The building opened on the twenty fourth of September twenty sixteen, with President Obama ringing a bell from a historic Black church to open the doors.
Did You Know? The bronze coloured lattice panels are cast aluminium, and their pattern was tuned so that roughly the same proportion of light passes through as through the historic ironwork of Charleston and New Orleans.
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