Cityscapes Revealed: Highlights from the Collection

Cityscapes Revealed Highlights from the Collection
The National Building Museum presents a first-time survey of its holdings in the long-term exhibition Cityscapes Revealed: Highlights from the Collection.

Cityscapes Revealed explores America’s architectural heritage through original building fragments; rare, early-20th-century photographs; intricate architectural drawings; and more.

The exhibition reflects the Museum’s rich permanent collection relating to quintessentially American, 20th-century- building typologies, from Beaux-Arts-style residences to main street storefronts and sleek downtown skyscrapers.

The exhibition, presented in honor of the Museum’s 25th anniversary, is on view in first-floor galleries.

Conceived as a visual primer for decoding the urban environment, the exhibition is organized as a walking tour of the cityscape, and anchored by a series of large architectural elements — including a copper dormer from the Carnegie Mansion on Millionaires’ Row in Manhattan (1902); a sheet-metal section of Salt Lake City’s legendary Z.C.M.I. department store (1901); and an Art Deco terra cotta window surround from the lost S.H. Kress & Co. five-and-dime in Phoenix (1933).

The exhibition also draws from a number of the Museum’s most significant collections, including the Northwestern Terra Cotta Collection (one of the largest collections