D.C.'s Art Gallery in an Abandoned Streetcar Tunnel Will Finally Open

Hou de Sousa, a New York architecture studio, will open the inaugural exhibition for Dupont Underground in Washington, D.C., in April. The exhibit will be the first major test of the premise of Dupont Underground—a plan to establish a new cultural center inside a disused trolley station underneath bustling Dupont Circle. Explaining exactly what the show will be, however, requires some unpacking.

Right now, the space looks more like an abandoned storage tunnel than an architecture pavilion. Boxes, rising in stacks along the tunnel walls of Dupont Underground, house the raw materials that Hou de Sousa, a two-person firm, will use to transform the space. Many hundreds of boxes. Columns and rows of them extend deep into the underground tunnels, hugging the walls until the light ends—then running for another two city blocks in the darkness.