I Lived in DC for 28 Years and Missed This

I lived in Washington, DC for 28 years. Walked past a lot of buildings in that time without ever looking twice.

One of them was the National Academy of Sciences on Constitution Avenue. Big stone building, built in 1924, dedicated by Calvin Coolidge. I don’t remember ever really noticing it. Never went inside.

David Enzel just wrote about that same building. Forty years of walking past it for him too, until a photography workshop got him through the side door on C Street. Inside is the Great Hall — a domed room with a giant painted sun at the center, surrounded by the planets as they were known back then. Architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue designed the building, and an artist named Hildreth Meière painted that whole dome by hand.

Reading it, I asked myself the same thing. How could I have missed that? I’m not down in that area a lot, just once in a while. But if I’d known about that dome, I would’ve gone to check it out in a second.

I love taking photos of architecture and deco details, old historical buildings like that. They’re beautiful to me. Next time I’m there, that building’s on my list. I’ll get a photo of that dome for my Instagram post.