The Museum at Dumbarton Oaks

About this audio guide

This guide to the pre-Columbian art pavilion at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. traces Philip Johnson's 1959 design of eight cylindrical, copper-domed galleries arranged in a nine-square grid, with the center square left open to the sky. It follows his shift from the glass-house modernism he was already famous for toward a warmer, more theatrical style, and the fight over an oversized first draft that patron Mildred Bliss pushed him to cut down. He began the design at fifty-three years old, already known for building himself a house entirely out of glass.