The Building I Walked Past for Forty Years

For more than forty years of living in Washington, I walked past the National Academy of Sciences building on Constitution Avenue.Many of those walks took me to or from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the reflecting pool on the National Mall. In my working years, I passed it on my way to meetings at the neighboring Federal Reserve—assuming, whenever I gave it a passing glance, that it was simply an annex of the Fed. It remained a large, imposing, anonymous block of stone on my routine route.Then, thanks to a Washington Photo Safaris workshop, I finally had a reason to go inside. The instructions were specific: don't enter through the grand door on Constitution Avenue. Use the barely marked door on C Street. I almost walked past that one, too.Inside was a revelation: the Great Hall, a secular cathedral dedicated not to saints but to science. Standing directly beneath the grand dome, built in the 1920s, more than sixty years after the Academy itself was founded, I looked up through my…