In the thick of summer’s hottest months, The National Building Museum understands the desire to bring fun indoors. For its latest summer installation, the museum is partnering with the firm Snarkitecture to build a 14,000-square-foot indoor playground, meant to serve as both an arena for children’s play and, for adults, a reminder of simpler times.
Complete with a rock-climbing wall, basketball court, and 100-foot-long obstacle course, the installation—dubbed The Playground—is set to open July 3. It continues the museum’s tradition, dating back to 2014, of temporary summer installations in the Great Hall.
Caitlin Bristol, the museum’s director of exhibition development, says when New York architecture firm Snarkitecture—which did past summer installations including The Beach in 2015 and Fun House in 2018—presented them with the idea for a playground, they saw it as a perfect opportunity to allow people to escape the day-to-day and simply play.
“Playgrounds are a very universal, accessible experience. Every American has probably been to one,” Bristol says. “Everyone can find something that speaks to them in a playground.”
The structures in the exhibit, which is open through August 30, are made out of birch plywood, which the designers said was an intentional choice to showcase the raw materials and design elements that go into classic playground structures that people often take for granted.
“Everything is not a given, everything is designed,” Bristol says. “It doesn’t appear like magic.”
Building the exhibit required over 1,000 sheets of birch plywood to create the nine different elements, including a 50-foot circular basketball court and a series of wavy walls that form a maze-like structure.
One of the biggest hurdles in constructing the exhibit, the designers say, was their inability to anchor any of the structures to the historic floor. The solution? A massive wooden platform covering almost the entire Great Hall, with flooring made of recycled Nike shoes.
The exhibit will have both an “adventure playground” for older kids and a “tot spot” for younger ones where they can use different materials to build their own creations.
“We want to bring people together as a community, and this is a concept that anybody can get behind,” Bristol says.
Tickets for access to the museum and The Playground, located at 401 F St NW, are $18.95 for adults and $15.95 for youth, seniors, and students. The museum will offer free admission throughout the installation to residents of certain wards on select days from 2 to 5 PM. A schedule of both youth and adult programming held throughout the exhibit’s run can be found at https://orders.nbm.org/events.
