a blog by Peter Leonard
Continuing September’s festival of travel, on to the capital for some Sir Norman Foster inside the old Portrait Gallery:
Can’t forget the Organization of American States!
Plus a tour of museums and monuments that weren’t here when I lived in the area in the late 90s:
Some things haven’t changed, though, like the Air and Space reliably delivering freeze-dried ice cream in their gift store.
The highlight of the trip for me was a visit to the otherwise unremarkable Madison Building at the Library of Congress. I spent a long time here as an eight-year-old, while my dad was doing research in the archives. (Other highlights from that trip: Montecello, Colonial Williamsburg.) I had high hopes of re-visiting the blue-tiled interior fountain court, where I was left to amuse myself in what a more innocent era regarded as not really such a big invitation to kidnapping, I hope. The only person who knew what I was talking about was the septuagenarian gentleman behind the Lost and Found desk, who was shocked that anybody else remembered that there had once, indeed, been a blue-tiled interior fountain courtyard, right over there where cubicles and partition walls now stood. I’m hoping some otherwise-forgotten article in Government Architectural Review happened to publish a picture of the interior courtyard sometime in the 1970s, before it was lost to the demands for more space. Where do kids hang out nowadays while their parents work?
