Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
- Architect
- Gordon Bunshaft
- Year
- 1974
- City
- Washington, DC
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden opened in 1974, built around the permanent art collection donated by financier Joseph H. Hirshhorn in the 1960s and designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft as the Smithsonian's museum of modern and contemporary art. It sits astride the L'Enfant axis, the north-south line through the Mall established in Pierre L'Enfant's 1791 city plan and reinforced by the 1901 MacMillan Plan.
the building
A cylinder on four legs. Bunshaft gave the museum an unusual form for its type: an open cylindrical drum raised on four massive legs, with a large fountain filling the central courtyard beneath it, a typological departure from the classical museum buildings elsewhere on the Mall.
the architect
Gordon Bunshaft designed the Hirshhorn as a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, one of the most highly significant modernist architects of his generation; the cylindrical museum is among his most visible individual commissions in Washington.
nearby
- Arts and Industries Building, Smithsonian Institution (National Museum)
- National Air and Space Museum
- Smithsonian Institution
- Freer Gallery of Art
- National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution
- National Gallery of Art