eGFI - Dream Up the Future Sign-up for The Newsletter  For Teachers Online Store Contact us Search
Read the Magazine
What's New?
Explore eGFI
Engineer your Path About eGFI
Autodesk - Change Your World
Overview E-tube Trailblazers Student Blog
  • Tag Cloud

  • What’s New?

  • Pages

  • RSS RSS

  • RSS Comments

  • Archives

  • Meta

American Roots

The National Park Service just turned 100 and what better way to celebrate than with the grand opening of a stunning new addition on the National Mall?

A stone’s throw from the Washington Monument, the $540 million National Museum of African American History and Culture—opening in September—promises to rival the iconic obelisk in scale and impact. Adorned with a corona, or scrim, of 3,600 bronze-colored cast-aluminum panels that glow at night from the light within, the distinctive exterior evokes “ornate 19th-century ironwork created by enslaved craftsmen in New Orleans,” the museum says.

Inside, visitors will ride an elevator 40 feet underground for a tour of the African American experience by way of artifacts ranging from the iron ballasts of a 1790s slave ship to an airplane used to train Tuskegee airmen and the 1990s Parliament Funkadelic Mothership, a 1,200-pound metal stage prop used at musician George Clinton’s concerts.

[Take Smithsonian magazine’s interactive tour or see The Washington Post’s exclusive peek inside the museum.]

NAAHM jim crow era train dropped into construction zone nhb201302463web.jpg__600x0_q85_upscale

Photo: A Jim Crow-era train car is lowered into the National Museum of African American History and Culture construction zone November 17, 2013. Michael R. Barnes/Smithsonian Institution

To accommodate five floors below grade, the foundation sinks so deep into the capital’s once-swampy National Mall that builders pumped 85 gallons of water per minute during construction. A second challenge was the installation of two vivid representations from America’s nine decades of racial segregation: a 77-ton, 80-foot-long railway car divided into separate seating for white and “colored” passengers, and a 21-foot cast-concrete guard tower from the Angola prison in Louisiana, where the mostly black inmates were subject to a penal labor practice that let private individuals lease prisoners. So big that they couldn’t be installed once the museum was completed, the exhibits arrived in a seven-truck convoy in 2013, then lowered into place in what the museum called “one of the most complex artifact-delivery operations in Smithsonian history,” lasting five hours. Construction then proceeded around them. – Mark Matthews

This article originally appeared in the September 2016 issue of the American Society of Engineering Education’s Prism magazine.

Comments or Questions?

By clicking the "Submit" button you agree to the eGFI Privacy Policy.