Design

Down With Fun!

“Fun House,” an installation by Snarkitecture at the National Building Museum, shows that the craze for crowd-friendly museum spectacles is still going strong.
Noah Kalina

Pinkeye struck the National Building Museum in 2015, just two weeks into the run of “The Beach.” At least one visitor said that she caught the bug at the D.C. museum’s summer spectacular. Hard to prove, but easy to believe, given that the attraction was a magnet for germs: a ginormous, roiling ball pit, filled with 750,000 plastic balls.

The risk was worth it, plenty of visitors decided. “The Beach”—designed by New York’s three-man design collective, Snarkitecture—drew more 183,000 visitors over its two-month run. That puts the exhibit in a category all by itself in the museum’s history. “The Beach” cemented the Building Museum’s annual architectural folly series as a rite of summer.