National Gallery of Art

This guide to the National Gallery of Art opens with a puzzle: both the banker who dreamed up the building and the architect who designed it died before a single column went up. You'll hear about the tradesmen hired in the depths of the Great Depression who actually built it, including a metal lather named Eastman who strung wire lath across the Rotunda dome, and about the crews grading blocks of Tennessee marble by shade as the building climbed. Look up into the dome and consider whose names never made it onto the building at all.