Venture Into the Smithsonian’s Underground Complex

The elegant Enid A. Haupt Garden sits in the center of the Quadrangle complex, bounded by some of the Smithsonian’s most historic buildings: the Castle, the Arts and Industries Building, and the Freer Gallery of Art. It spreads across 4.2 acres, with courts and contemplative corners designed to evoke a traditional Persian garden, a Chinese water garden, and an ornate Victorian parterre— creating a dialogue between East and West. Despite its grandeur, it is in a sense only a roof garden. Beneath this placid scene is an immense sunken structure housing the National Museum of African Art, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, and the S. Dillon Ripley Center. Three separate pavilions in the garden lead to the two underground museums and the education center.

The collection of the African Art Museum was amassed by Warren M. Robbins (1923–2008), a Foreign Service o≈cer, who displayed it beginning in 1964 in a Capitol Hill rowhouse where Frederick Douglass had once resided. Robbins founded the museum to teach Americans the value of African art and culture. Now a leading center for the study and display of ancient and contemporary African visual arts, it became a part of the Smithsonian by a 1979 act of Congress. The Sackler Gallery, together with the Freer, forms the National Museum of Asian Art. It was named for Arthur M. Sackler (1913–87), the pharmaceutical research scientist and marketing executive whose 1982 gift to the Smithsonian included a thousand outstanding Asian and Near Eastern works of art and funding for a building.

The desire to place the Sackler Gallery next to the Freer, coupled with the lack of open space on the Mall, drove the selection of the utilitarian South Yard behind the Castle as the site for the new museum complex. The Quadrangle opened to the public in 1987, following a complicated planning, design, and construction phase lasting nine years. Recalling a historic design feature of many English and American colleges and universities, the Quadrangle also reflects in its name Secretary Ripley’s vision for the Smithsonian as a university open to all the world—a place for scholars, students, artists, and families to come together.

A number of architects and landscape architects contributed to the Quadrangle. In 1978 the Japanese architect Junzo Yoshimura (1908–97), a figure greatly admired by American art patrons and revered in his own country, developed the concept of a discreet building located within and largely under a garden. Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott (today Shepley Bulfinch), the oldest continuously operating American architecture firm, was retained in 1980 to shepherd the project through the historic preservation and design review process and to oversee construction.

In response to comments by the US Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission, Jean-Paul Carlhian (1919–2012), principal architect for Shepley Bulfinch, significantly reworked the design. He recast the project to harmonize the new facilities with the existing landmark buildings of the Mall. From the strong colors and Victorian skylines of the Castle and the Arts and Industries Building, he developed the pyramidal roofs of the Sackler Gallery and the reddish hue of the African Art Museum. From the arch and wave motifs of the limestone Freer Gallery, he adopted the warm gray granite color of the Sackler and the rounded domes of African Art. The third garden structure, a round, pagoda-like pavilion that provides the entrance to the Ripley Center, was adapted from a drawing by the English garden designer Humphry Repton (1752–1818).

Nearly 96 percent of the Quadrangle lies underground. The engineering and design were extremely challenging, because one-third of the complex sits below the city’s water table. Concrete slurry walls, a construction technique developed in Carlhian’s native France, were used to build the foundations. The engineers had to account for the weight of the garden’s several feet of damp earth and its cast-concrete water features.

Great care was taken to create a graceful descent into the underground facilities. The pavilion entrances have soaring ceilings and huge windows that frame vistas of the garden and the Castle. Carlhian wanted to avoid the association of going down into a “bargain basement” or an underground garage, so he suffused the stairways of the two museums with light from stained-glass windows—amber for the Sackler and blue for African Art—as well as from clear glass skylights in the roof. Each stairway was given its own distinctive design, echoing the forms of the roofs— curved for African Art and diamond-shaped for the Sackler. And at the bottom of each stair is a sparkling water effect, reflecting the light from above. 

The limestone spiral stairway for the entrance pavilion to the Ripley Center is a postmodern take on the monumental spiral stair of the Renaissance chateau of Blois in France. Halfway down, the visitor arrives at a shallow circular space lined with short, swelling columns, where the path swings around toward the concourse. Deliberately low and dark, this domed vestibule offers a dramatic contrast to the soaring, light-filled concourse below that serves all facilities. Lined with abstract classical motifs and crossed by bridges three stories above, this hall directs visitors to exhibitions and numerous classrooms.

The Haupt Garden is a remarkable oasis in the city, a far cry from the days when the South Yard contained work sheds and a parking lot. Enid A. Haupt (1906–2005), the publishing heiress and horticulture patron who funded it, requested mature specimen trees, saying that she was “getting on” and wanted to be able to enjoy the garden personally. The landscape designer Lester Collins (who was also involved in the reworking of the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden) was brought in to consult on the plant selection. The African Art section features water effects evocative of North African–influenced designs in Andalusia. The Sackler garden, with its pink granite moon gates, was inspired by the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. The central parterre replicates the Victorian garden created behind the Castle for the Bicentennial in 1976. Nineteenth-century lampposts and the Smithsonian’s collection of historic cast-iron garden furniture, urns, and wickets are scattered throughout the garden. The red sandstone gates at the Independence Avenue entrance to the garden are based on James Renwick’s unexecuted original design; they were carved by Constantine Seferlis (1930– 2005), a Greek-born stone carver who also worked on the Washington National Cathedral. Marrying old and new, the Renwick gates provide an elegant entryway to the hidden treasures of the Quadrangle complex.

Read more in A Guide to Smithsonian Architecture 2nd Edition, which is available from Smithsonian Books. Visit Smithsonian Books’ website to learn more about its publications and a full list of titles. 

Excerpt from A Guide to Smithsonian Architecture 2nd Edition © 2022 by the Smithsonian Institution