Review of The Playground at the National Building Museum
The National Building Museum is a fantastic place for anyone, including families. The exhibits are compelling, and some of them are interactive. The building architecture itself is impressive, and the history of it can be found in what is perhaps the most intriguing exhibit. On the second floor, three mostly empty rooms contain a few panels of information about when it was the Pension building, and the man who designed it Montgomery C. Meigs (who was an interesting character and also was responsible for the Lee mansion being turned into Arlington Cemetary). There are also photos in the rooms showing what they looked like when it was the Pension building. Aside from the info though, kids love empty rooms and really these rooms are worth going into just for their echoing acoustics.
I’ve been to some of the other special exhibits in the great hall of the National Building Museum, including LAWN (2019), which featured an indoor hill with hammocks, each with its own curated soundscape. It wasn’t completely mind blowing, but it was fun and surprising, and we enjoyed it.
THE PLAYGROUND is not fun or even interesting. It is actually really insulting and the only surprising thing about it is that the museum would allow something so exclusionary to be put on display. For me, the bad outweighed the good and I’ll tell you about it so you can make your own choices.
The Promise
THE PLAYGROUND by Snarkitecture claims online and in their signage to be several things:
- It’s for people of all ages
- It’s a chance for adults to have a rare opportunity to play
- It has elements of a playground but presented in unexpected ways
- It highlights construction materials essential to our built environment that are often overlooked
- It brings playground concepts from outdoors to indoors
- It encourages climbing, swinging, scrambling and other physical activity
- It’s about possibility rather than a predetermined experience
- It fosters community and joy
Let’s see if these are achieved. (Spoiler alert: they are not!)
Entrance
I called ahead to see about accessibility, and they do have wheelchairs available, and you can get one with a minimum of fuss. THE PLAYGROUND is “wheelchair accessible” they assured me on the phone (but, see below), and the second floor of the building can be reached by elevator.
Wristbands are colored and allow access for a specific time slot of one hour.
For the day we went, if you only wanted to buy tickets for entry into the other regular exhibits of the Building Museum, you could do that with a 10am ticket time, but they seem to have changed that and all tickets are priced higher with an hour of access to THE PLAYGROUND (though some say Standby, which means, not even guaranteed access).
Tickets to The Building Museum are normally $10 adults, $7 kids 3+/seniors/students
Tickets including THE PLAYGROUND are $19 adults, $16 kids 2+/seniors/students
The Playground
You can book tickets ahead of time, or buy them on site. It turns out, even if you buy them online ahead of time, you have to stand in the same line as people who need to buy tickets. This is not made clear by staff at the entrance or signage, and the line is long. Note that you also need to sign a waiver for every member of the party before getting wristbands for entering the exhibit.
THE PLAYGROUND takes up essentially the entire center of the great hall, and is surrounded by a fence, with one entrance and one exit. It is one space but has several zones. There are signs on the zones, which serve the purpose of telling you things you aren’t allowed to do and/or who is not allowed to be in the space. A sort of foreshadowing.
We did not try the climbing wall because the line was too long. Probably if we tried it, they would tell us we were doing it wrong. Climbing walls are often found indoors, so even the innovation of bringing the outdoors indoors was unclear here. We did not do the obstacle course, because it only fit a certain height of child, and it didn’t have anything very interesting in it: some things to walk across and through and small slides at the end. There was a speaker by the obstacle course playing music, but it was completely unclear why.
We spent a bit of time with the foam blocks (also often found indoors), but there wasn’t anything special about them, and they kept getting into the pathway, making navigating around that space difficult. There are foam blocks in one of the regular access exhibits at the museum “Building Stories” which are much more interesting because they have words and abstract images on them, and there is a wall that silently invites blocks to be placed in the same shaped holes, and kids and adults of all ages were playing imaginatively on those, much more so than in THE PLAYGROUND.
There is a scaffold type of see through maze that seemed at first glance to be interesting and inviting to climb, until a staff member told a girl near us she wasn’t allowed to climb it. Also, the spaces were not well thought out and the juxtaposition with the columns was an unleveraged opportunity. It seemed at first accessible to wheelchairs but while the doorways were probably “technically” wide enough the layout made it not really feasible. Looked like it could have been cool, but was a miss.
There was a very messy and crowded digging zone, which we skipped. It was less interesting than a sandbox we could find at a local park and not worth it.
The “Sport Court” was only basketball. With normal basketball hoops. And normal basketballs. (Another thing commonly found indoors…) It was crowded and unsafe for small kids or elderly adults with no incentive. The outside of it was one of the more positive and memorable aspects of THE PLAYGROUND: heavy plastic strips that made a curtain effect and kept the balls in while allowing access and exit points all the way around the circle.
The middle zone seemed to hold the most interest for kids, with a hill like structure that was in fact climbable, some slides, and a tunnel through the middle. The tunnel was very short, allowing a standing toddler but anyone else would need to crawl. It seemed to be the most playful aspect, however the usage of it was pretty well dictated by its structure.
Another area had hammocks. That’s about all I can say about it, except that they weren’t hung very thoughtfully and if people did any swinging the heavy wood frame poked out at people’s faces as they tried to walk by. I suppose the exposed scaffolding may have been intended as a feature but it just made the area look unfinished. Also… it didn’t function well as a support for the hammocks… which was its primary purpose.
Oh yeah, and there were some red rolly chairs around, which were amusing for a little while… but we have them in a local park as well. Was not innovative, and they were just placed around without evidence of thoughtfulness.
Why you really should skip it
I can’t put it off any longer. The zone that made me so mad I decided to write this bad review even though I love the National Building Museum.
A sign on it said “Adult Observation Zone.” That sounded promising. Perhaps it would be things designed for adults, maybe with something synergistic for the kids to do! Nope. Gotta read the fine print. It was an area where parents were not allowed inside, and was designated as only for kids age 6 and up.
The driving concept seemed to be that parents do too much hovering around their kids, telling them what to do and how to do it and helping them too much, and so this would give the kids some space from their parents, allowing them to be more creative. This in itself is a bit insulting, but even more so when it became clear that the aproned staff member stationed there was not a facilitator for the kids inside but a bouncer, allowing parents in only to whisk away their under 6 child (who didn’t read the tiny sign and thus didn’t know they weren’t allowed there) who inevitably started sobbing. The soundscape was a constant stream of crying, “I’m sorry, you aren’t allowed in here,” “How old is your child?” etc. Sometimes a kid who clearly wasn’t over 6 would slip in, and then there were parents going wait a minute, why is that kid allowed and mine isn’t? And there were some kids who needed a bit more parental proximity for various reasons, who also couldn’t participate. It was horrifying. It was unfair. It was divisive. It was the opposite of fun and inclusive. Shame on you National Building Museum for allowing this monstrous bullying, exclusionary behavior in what claims to be “fun for all ages”!
Perhaps my view is skewed? It seems not. When I spoke with the staff in the gift shop, they indicated that people were generally not pleased with the exhibit.
The exhibit must have cost a fortune. Look at all the sponsors. There are so many positive directions this exhibit could have gone. My cousin thought it would be nice to have some educational angle, perhaps a chance to try playgrounds through history. I could also envision some thoughtful designs that would encourage multi-generational play, perhaps an interactive sound element, maybe different levels of sight lines that reveal different patterns. What if the sport court had items inside not normally associated with sports? Or items everyone could play with, maybe neutrally buoyant balloons? So. Many. Possibilities. Possibilities that would make people feel good and bring people together. Possibilities that would allow more than what people thought was possible, rather than chastising them for trying what was explicitly invited. Maybe at the beginning, those possibilities were on the table. It’s hard to imagine how this premise “Designed for all ages, the installation supports motion, exploration, and togetherness in an immersive environment where play becomes a shared social and cultural experience” resulted in the actual experience. While THE PLAYGROUND does not meet its stated objectives, the objectives themselves are worthy and maybe a new (or existing?) exhibit somewhere could achieve this desired outcome.
