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"View Slideshow\n\nThe history of aviation contains in capsule view the ingenuity, daring and dash of the human animal. So, too, does architecture, if over a greater span of time. What happens when the skills of the latter discipline are matched with the artifacts of the former? If the architects are Bill Hellmuth and his teammates at Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum, the collecting institution is the Smithsonian and the major donor is entrepreneur Steven F. Udvar-Hazy (with a budget amplified by funds from Congress), the results are downright enchanting.\n\nEnchanting may seem like a curious word to describe material that ranges from the bulky (the Boeing 367-80, the prototype for the 707) to the bellicose (the Enola Gay, the SR-71 Blackbird) to the make-believe (a model of the mother ship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind), but you only have to spend a few hours at the National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center, near Washington Dulles International Airport in Chantilly, Virginia, to succumb to the spell cast by a thoughtfully designed building that cleverly contains a spectacular collection. The museum, which opened in December 2003 with 83 aircraft, now displays 153 of a projected 220 in all, together with 150 artifacts related to space travel and hundreds of smaller associated objects, everything from trench art like brass bomb casings delicately carved by soldiers during World War I to powdered cabbage soup (provenance: U.S.S.R.; purpose: dining in outer space).\n\n\"When we hang the craft, we try to show them in positions or at angles that capture their spirit or purpose.\"\n\nWhile the planning of this building was protracted and difficult, its concept was simple and its construction, at under three years, impressively fleet. Soon after the first National Air and Space Museum, which was also designed by HOK, opened on the Mall in 1976 and quickly became the most visited museum in America, Smithsonian curators began anticipating the need for a structure that could show aircraft too large to be driven through the streets of downtown D.C. They also knew that, in no time, the collection would expand far beyond the limitations of the building's 5,000 square feet.\n\nDecades of debating, fund-raising and architect- and site-seeking followed until an idea crystallized around building a museum next to Dulles. The location was close enough to D.C. to feel connected to the museum on the Mall; it also made it possible for retired aircraft to land near, and taxi over to, their future home.\n\nDulles\u2014or rather its genre of building\u2014also provided a catalyst for the museum's design. \"It was important to have a visual and visceral connection to an airport,\" explains Hellmuth. \"You enter 15 feet higher than you park, as you do at Dulles's terminal. There's a control tower that gives you a view of the actual airport a few miles up the road.\" The gracefully arching structure nods, as well, to the form of an airplane or zeppelin hangar: Ten stories high and the length of three football fields, it contains 250,000 square feet, with much more usable space, since objects can be suspended overhead in two and sometimes three layers.\n\nWhile the building may look like a hangar, Hellmuth points out, \"it does many un-hangarlike things.\" Each of its 21 trusses, for example, can hold 20,000 pounds, which is important if you are planning on hanging aircraft from them (a typical World War II fighter plane weighs 10,000 pounds). Whereas most air and space museums display aircraft against a wall of windows and sky beyond to suggest planes in flight, the Smithsonian curators called for an atmosphere more protective of the surprisingly fragile collection. (Phase II plans call for a restoration facility that will be visible through windows.) The architects' solution was to trick the eye. Visitors arrive at a brilliantly glazed entrance and then, as their eyes adjust, make their way into gradually dimmer galleries. In the largest, the aviation hangar, Hellmuth and his team designed an artificial sky, a ceiling with no corners that is illuminated by tilted clerestory light; in the adjoining space hangar, they inverted the approach by darkening the ceiling to evoke outer space.\n\nThis is just one of the museum's many striking effects. The collection is arranged in larger thematic categories (military, commercial, space), but there is no single path through the building, so groups of visitors can pursue individual interests. There is also no single level at which to see the aircraft: The aviation hangar features a mezzanine catwalk that brings visitors up for an uncommonly close view of planes suspended in the air.\n\nMuch of the museum's vibrancy derives from the way exhibits designer Jake Jacobs has mounted the artifacts. \"When we hang the craft, we try to show them in positions or at angles that capture their spirit or purpose,\" he says, sounding a bit like a man who works with exotic animal species at a museum of natural history. An aerobatic plane like the 1945 Pitts Special Little Stinker, with which Betty Skelton won the 1949 and 1950 International Feminine Aerobatic Championships, is shown, for instance, upside down in the museum's entrance. In the area dedicated to military aircraft, the Enola Gay towers over the Aichi Seiran, a bomber that could be launched from a submarine and had been scheduled for a kamikaze mission two days after the Enola Gay dropped its bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. (Its pilot, visiting the Udvar-Hazy Center a lifetime later, said, \"This plane and I are both here only because of an accident of timing.\")\n\nThe breadth of the museum is such that it can accommodate, and not be overwhelmed by, a recently retired Concorde (donated, as many of the planes were, in 2003), which has the longest fuselage in the collection, or the Super Constellation, with the widest wingspan. There are objects whose size, or scale, has to be seen to be grasped. Consider the juxtaposition of the Apollo, Gemini and Mercury capsules, which, at nine feet in length, are scarcely larger than a spa tub, with the instrument unit from the Saturn V rocket that sent astronauts to the moon. This isolated fragment of the launching rocket measures a Brobdingnagian 22 feet in diameter.\n\nThe Udvar-Hazy Center abounds in seemingly endless curiosities: the Grumman G-21 \"Goose,\" an amphibious \"air yacht\" that during the 1930s would pick up businessmen on Wall Street and fly them to their weekend spreads on Long Island, and the Mobile Quarantine Facility, where crew members from the Apollo 11 mission were observed for possible infection by \"moon germs\" for 65 hours following their return to Earth (it's basically a converted Airstream trailer). These compete with objects of such delicacy that it's hard to understand how they have survived, among them a woven basket from the heyday of ballooning and the Langley Aerodrome A, with its diaphanous cloth-covered wings, which crashed on December 8, 1903, just days before the Wright Brothers' successful flights.\n\nPossibly the most beautiful installation of all is the cluster of satellites in the space hangar that Jacobs has nicknamed the wind chimes\u2014mainly out of his fear that, when the museum's vast doors are open, they might start swinging at one another and make accidental music (it has not happened to date). Small, shimmery, more sea creature\u2013like than intergalactic, they resemble drawings made by an imaginative teenager in the 1950s, dreams or fantasies of what satellites ought to be. Their improbable charm is alone worth the price of admission\u2014which, this being the Smithsonian, is of course free.\n\n *\n\nFor more information, call the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at 202-633-1000 or visit www.nasm.si.edu/udvarhazy.\n\n*"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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