The Building I Walked Past for Forty Years

For more than forty years of living in Washington, I walked past the National Academy of Sciences building on Constitution Avenue.

Many of those walks took me to or from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the reflecting pool on the National Mall. In my working years, I passed it on my way to meetings at the neighboring Federal Reserve—assuming, whenever I gave it a passing glance, that it was simply an annex of the Fed. It remained a large, imposing, anonymous block of stone on my routine route.

Then, thanks to a Washington Photo Safaris workshop, I finally had a reason to go inside. The instructions were specific: don't enter through the grand door on Constitution Avenue. Use the barely marked door on C Street. I almost walked past that one, too.

Inside was a revelation: the Great Hall, a secular cathedral dedicated not to saints, but to science. Standing beneath the grand dome—built in 1924, more than sixty years after the Academy itself was founded—I looked up through my camera viewfinder.

Inside the National Academy of Sciences: the view from the floor of the Great Hall looking up toward the dome.

At the very center, where a cathedral dome might open to the sky, sits a painted sun, its rays reaching across the tile toward the edges of the dome.

I hadn't expected to find a sun indoors.

I kept looking, turning slowly beneath it, trying to decide where to point the lens. Forty years of walking past without seeing—and now, through a viewfinder, I couldn't stop looking.

Stepping inside reveals the Great Hall in full scale—where massive stone arches and a Prometheus mural give way to the luminous tile dome above.

How could I have missed this?

What made the moment stranger was a realization that echoed thousands of miles away. Two years earlier, walking along the Seine in Paris, I had stood on the Pont des Arts to photograph the grand dome of the Institut de France—home to the Académie des sciences, the French counterpart to the building I was now standing in. I had carefully composed, focused on, and photographed the French temple of science before I had ever bothered to find the small door of the American one in my own backyard.

We carry maps of distant cities in our minds while walking blind through our own.

Now, when I walk down Constitution Avenue, the building is no longer a blank wall or a Fed annex. It is the place where a small door on C Street opens onto a painted sun.