Cell-Phone Tour Transcript: National Gallery of Art East Building

East Building
I. M. Pei, architect

The original building of the National Gallery of Art–what we now call the West Building–opened at Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue in 1941. Even at that time, there was an awareness that the nation's art collection would eventually require a second building. Almost thirty years later the Gallery enlisted I. M. Pei to design the East Building at Fourth and Constitution, and it opened to the public in 1978. At the twentieth-anniversary celebration for the building, Pei reflected back on the problem of how to harmonize the two very different structures:

I.M. Pei: I think that the challenge, and a very difficult one, was how to do it, how to make the West Building and the East Building look comfortable together. Architecturally, they're forty years apart, and a neoclassic style by John Russell Pope–by the way, I think that is one of the finest neoclassic buildings we have in America, and it's by the finest architect of that period. So I was very much aware of that challenge.

Pei met the challenge, to be sure. To give the two buildings a similar color and tonality, he used marble from the same quarry that had supplied the building stone for the 1941 structure. He also aligned the façade of the new building with that of the West Building so that they face each other with a certain kinship across the Fourth Street Plaza.

While the façade of the East Building is symmetrical, one of the first things that strikes you upon entering is its tremendous asymmetry. There is hardly a right angle to be found. Pei based the design on the trapezoid of land that the building occupies at the intersection of Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue. He divided the trapezoid into two triangular units that sit back to back in a scheme that ties the building into its site.

For the second stop on the tour, please head toward the Calder mobile at the center of the atrium.