Foster + Partners shroud a courtyard with a quiet, ethereal glass canopy for two museums at the Smithsonian Institution

摘要

On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln took the second oath of office on the East Portico of the Capitol, returned to the White House, and then greeted guests that night at his second—and, sadly, last—inaugural ball in the Great Hall of the Old Patent Office Building. It was the first time an inaugural ball had been celebrated at a government building, let alone in one that contained what many argued at the time to be one of the finest rooms in Washington, D.C., designed by the well-known 19th-century architect John Mills, refinished in 1881 by Aldolf Cluss in dizzying Victorian patterns of marble.