Kogod Courtyard

Author's Comments

Most of what I love about this courtyard is the ceiling, and most of what the ceiling does is move. The Foster canopy looks still from a distance, a frozen wave caught in glass and white steel, but spend an hour underneath it and you realize the whole thing is a timekeeper. The shadows slide. The grid stretches and compresses across the floor as the sun climbs. By late morning, when the light is high and diffuse, the pattern on the stone is nearly as intricate as the pattern overhead, and the two geometries start to talk to each other. I come here in winter most often. The courtyard is climate controlled and softly lit, and on a gray January day the canopy pulls whatever light the sky has and distributes it evenly across the space. That even fill is a gift. It flatters the older facades of the two museums on either side, brick and sandstone that were never meant to be interior walls but now read as exactly that. Wide is the obvious lens and I use it. But the photograph I keep trying to make is tighter - a single section of the canopy where the curve is most pronounced, with the shadow of its own structure falling across the travertine below. It is an image about a building looking at itself. Admission is free, the benches are comfortable, and nobody will rush you. I have spent whole afternoons here with a notebook and a camera and left with more of both than I started.

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