Ahoy!

Designs unveiled in “artistic ideas competition” for new National Museum of the United States Navy.

Design teams led by five prominent architecture firms revealed proposals last month for what could lead to the next major museum in Washington, D.C.—a new home for the National Museum of the United States Navy. The selected schemes are by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), Gehry Partners, DLR Group, Perkins&Will, and Quinn Evans.

The five teams were finalists in an “artistic ideas competition” held by the U.S. Navy and its historical and curatorial arm, the Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC). The competition was meant to show “the full spectrum of possibilities” for creating a museum and ceremonial courtyard to replace the current 1962 museum, which is on the grounds of the Washington Navy Yard in the District of Columbia.

A location for the new museum has not been finalized, but the Navy has a preferred site at M Street SE and Sixth Street SE, just outside the security fence that surrounds the Navy Yard complex in southeast Washington. For the purposes of the ideas competition, the brief was “site-agnostic,” as one official put it.

The NHHC’s vision is to create a new, “public-facing” museum and campus that will “energize public awareness of the integral role the Navy plays in the defense of our country and in the protection of our interests as a maritime nation.”

Besides honoring service members and veterans, the museum is intended to “engage, inspire and educate civilians, active-duty personnel and future generations of Sailors by connecting cutting-edge interactive and multimedia displays to the Navy’s most important and enduring historic artifacts.”

The goal of the competition, according to planners, was to “share conceptual museum ideas with America” and find out what prospective visitors would like to see included in a new museum.

“The Artistic Ideas Competition is an effort to explore the full realm of artistic concepts that might be incorporated,” a fact sheet distributed at the event stated.

Each finalist received $50,000 for participating. A winner was not named. Organizers said all five submissions will be used to show the possibilities for the prospective museum and the renderings may be used to raise money to build it.

The project’s estimated budget is $475 million, according to the U.S. Naval Institute. Sponsors of the competition say their goal is for the museum to be privately funded. That makes it different from the museums planned by the Smithsonian Institution, which are owned by the federal government and rely on funding from Congress.

Now that the designs have been unveiled, the competition organizers intend to get reaction from the public to see what resonates with potential visitors. The NHHC plans to hold additional public showcases this summer. Charles Swift, the museum’s acting director, said the navy and NHHC hope to arrive at a design and secure funds in time to break ground on October 13, 2025, the Navy’s 250th anniversary.

DLR Group designed a building whose faceted form is meant to be “a dialogue of water and sky,” said principal Dennis Bree. Visitors would enter “through water” and “rise to the sky” via an “interpretive platform lift,” then descend through ramped walkways toward the exhibit galleries, where they’ll learn about the Navy and its history. The building would be clad in reflective metal panels so that its shape would reflect the water and the skies, “forging them together.” The preserved mast of the USS Constitution would be mounted on top of the occupiable portion of the museum, up to 170 feet in the air, making it a city landmark that’s visible from a great distance.

BIG designed its museum as a series of five elongated, gabled galleries that step up in height and represent the five branches of the Navy: Surface, Subsurface, Exploration, Aviation, and Space. The five “wings” merge in a “sinuous plan,” creating a “landmark” atrium space on the inside and a sculptural roofscape on the outside. The designers said the rising of the volumes references “the formation of naval fleets in the ocean and the sky,” while the gables are references to the gabled buildings elsewhere in the Navy Yard. Their copper cladding was inspired by overlapping wood boards or metal plates on a ship’s hull. The wings could be built in two or more phases, as funding permits.

Perkins&Will conceived of the museum as “a physical manifestation of endurance,” symbolic of the “resilient and flexible fiber of the Navy—shaped and strengthened over centuries of maritime power.” Sail-like volumes sweep across the site, expressing a sense of balance between forces “forged by the sea.” The arrival experience marks “the moment a visitor leaves the civilian landscape to join the team-oriented world of the Navy” and explore its history “from the depths to the stars.” The Honor Courtyard is a place where land, air, and sea intersect, and artifacts are displayed in settings that evoke the context in which they function.

Gehry Partners, with Craig Webb as project designer, proposed a large, simple volume with glass on three sides filled with naval artifacts and images that would be visible from outside the building. Inside, images, graphics, and video projections would be layered to tell a story about the different eras in the Navy’s history. Brian O’Laughlin, senior associate from Gehry Partners, said Frank Gehry didn’t propose a highly sculptural form for the museum because he didn’t want the building to overwhelm what the messaging is. The building is “meant to, on a subconscious level, not be so linear and to really convey the depth of who the Navy is.”

Quinn Evans conceived of the building as “Homeport,” a place meets community and the Navy together.” The building’s long, linear forms “reflect the piers, ships and Navy Yard vernacular, providing a connection to the work of the Navy and a greater appreciation for its history and heritage.” With multistory window walls providing views of what’s inside, the design “metaphorically places the individual visitor at the threshold of land and sea, surrounded by immersive experiences and paths of discovery.”

Saved from destruction, a rock installation by artist Elyn Zimmerman is relocated to American University and renamed.

Five massive boulders are arranged in semicircular formation, abutting a reflecting pool on the American University campus in Washington, D.C. This isn’t the first installation of the oversize granite rocks, which have a combined weight of 450,000 pounds. The five pieces compose a work by artist Elyn Zimmerman originally titled Marabar that was commissioned in 1984 as a landscape element for the National Geographic Society (NGS) campus in the nation’s capital.

Marabar was prominently installed in the public plaza at the NGS campus designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) and landscape architect James Urban. Several decades later, a campus overhaul at the NGS called for the removal of the art piece. In 2017 the organization wrote to Zimmerman about its planned campus redesign, detailing in its correspondence the need for the installation to be located elsewhere. The letter gave the artist a deadline and asked her to decide what to do with the sculpture.

“If you do not let us know by then of your intent to move the sculpture, the sculpture will need to be removed by us,” the letter stated.

The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) stepped in to help Zimmerman.

TCLF is a nonprofit organization that educates and engages the public to make our shared landscape heritage more visible, identify its value, and empower its stewards. It launched a campaign for Marabar that designated the piece as one of its at-risk Landslide sites, and it gathered letters from landscape architects, architects, and journalists committed to seeing the work installed somewhere else. David Childs of SOM, who had worked on the original NGS campus, was among the supporters. To save the work, in 2021 the NGS agreed to relocate the sculpture and covered the cost of its removal.

The NGS suggested moving the sculptures to Washington Canal Park, but the idea was nixed by Zimmerman and Dave Rubin, landscape architect of Washington Canal Park. The artist explored several spots, ultimately settling on a location on the campus of American University. On the new site the positioning of the rocks was altered from its original iteration; here, the boulders are arranged in response to existing plants and trees. Zimmerman felt that with a new location, arrangement, and refurbishment the sculpture deserved a new title. She rechristened the piece Sudama

“Although reminiscent of Marabar, the new setting, and a thorough cleaning and repolishing of worn spots after 40 years made the piece look new and unique, so it needed a new title,” the artist said in an interview with TCLF.

In both locations the rocks are placed around a water element. Some faces of the rocks are left in their unaltered, rugged state, while others are cut and polished. These mirrored surfaces reflect their sur- roundings, including other rocks, nearby buildings, and the landscape.

Both titles are references to the E. M. Forster book A Passage to India. In the novel, the author recalls a visit to the Barabar Caves in northeast India. In Forster’s dramatization, the name of the caves was changed to Marabar. Sudama is the name of another cave referenced in the text.

“Though we regret the loss of Marabar at its original location, we are pleased that its creator, artist Elyn Zimmerman, with the support of National Geographic, retained the ability to control its reconfiguration and relocation to the American University campus,” TCLF’s president and CEO, Charles A. Birnbaum, said in a statement.

“Had TCLF not intervened beginning in March 2020, when the artist was resigned to the loss of one of her most important works, this acclaimed installation would likely have been demolished.” KK