Giant, Interactive “Icebergs” Take Over D.C.’s National Building Museum

To offer a respite from the jungle heat of summer in Washington, the National Building Museum has mounted Icebergs, an immersive 12,540-square-foot installation designed by James Corner Field Operations (whose work includes New York City’s High Line) that transforms the museum’s Great Hall into a chilly, nature-inspired simulacrum of a glacial field.

“ICEBERGS invokes the surreal underwater-world of glacial ice fields,” said James Corner, founder and director of James Corner Field Operations, in a press release. “Such a world is both beautiful and ominous given our current epoch of climate change, ice-melt, and rising seas.”

Until Sept. 5, visitors can hang out in pointy ice-white beanbag chairs on the “ocean floor” and contemplate climate change while looking up at a “water line” suspended 20 feet above or enjoy a panoramic view from the exhibition’s crowning 56-foot-tall iceberg. The installation, made from materials such as scaffolding and polycarbonate paneling, also includes an “ice chute” slide.

“ICEBERGS symbolizes an extreme counterpoint to the sweltering heat of the Washington, D.C. summer,” said Chase W. Rynd, executive director of the National Building Museum. “We hope that James Corner Field Operations’ striking design will provoke both serious public conversation about the complex relationship between design and landscape, while also eliciting a sense of wonder and play among visitors of all ages.”