Building Stories at the National Building Museum

FAIN: GI-290842-23

National Building Museum (Washington, DC 20001-2637)
Cathy Frankel (Project Director: August 2022 to present)

Implementation of a long-term exhibition exploring the built environments in children’s books and how those worlds lay the foundations for understanding our surroundings.

The National Building Museum—the country’s only cultural institution illuminating what, how, and why we build—respectfully requests a grant of $400,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to implement Building Stories, a new, long-term exhibition exploring the built environment as we first discover it—through the pages of children’s books. By activating these stories and their built worlds, and the early foundations for how we begin to understand our surroundings, Building Stories will allow us to investigate the role the built environment plays in our own lives and communities—and how we can be agents of change for its more sustainable, equitable future.