Building
It resides in the National Historic Landmarked Old Patent Office Building (now renamed the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture), located just south of Chinatown in the Penn Quarter district of downtown Washington. The third oldest federal building in the city, constructed between 1836 and 1867, the marble and granite museum has porticoes modeled after the Parthenon in Athens, Greece.
The building was used as a hospital during the American Civil War. Walt Whitman worked there and used his experiences as a basis for The Wound Dresser. The Bureau of Indian Affairs moved into the building after the war ended. Whitman used to work as a clerk for the bureau until 1867, when he was fired after a manuscript of Leaves of Grass was found in his desk.
It was spared from demolition by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1958, and given to the Smithsonian, which renovated the structure and opened the National Museum of American Art (later renamed the Smithsonian American Art Museum) and National Portrait Gallery there in 1968.
It is the eponym for the Gallery Place Washington Metro station, located across the intersection of F and 7th Streets, Northwest.
Read more about this topic: National Portrait Gallery (United States)
Famous quotes containing the word building:
“Our civilization is characterized by the word “progress.” Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only as a means to this end, not as an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“Culture is a sham if it is only a sort of Gothic front put on an iron building—like Tower Bridge—or a classical front put on a steel frame—like the Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street. Culture, if it is to be a real thing and a holy thing, must be the product of what we actually do for a living—not something added, like sugar on a pill.”
—Eric Gill (1882–1940)
“A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)