NBM’s 25th Anniversary
Posted on July 9th, 2005 at 10:40 am by SwethSome people will go to great lengths to have a party, even if it means ignoring five years and making a tenuous connection between barns and architecture.
In 1980, the US Congress established the charter for one of my favorite museums in DC—The National Building Museum, aka the Building Building. Even though the Building Building building itself didn’t open for another 5 years, then, 2005 is technically the museum’s 25th anniversary. To celebrate, NBM is hosting a summer film series exploring the relationship between architecture and film, kicking off with a slew of movies today and tomorrow, and then continuing with live music and movies every Wednesday evening through the end of August.
The connection between many of these movies and architecture is tenuous at best (Who Framed Roger Rabbit appears to qualify because it involves an attempt to raze a cartoon city, and Summer Stock is featured because it takes place in a barn), but some of the pairings are inspired—on July 20th, for example, they start off with a documentary about organic farming and how it relates to real estate development, and follow it up with Soylent Green, which proposes a very different solution to the problem of feeding an overpopulated urban community. And unlike the annual Screen on the Green showings that the National Park Service presents on the Mall, these movies don’t require you to camp out in the stifling DC summer heat.