ABSTRACT
In the act that established the Smithsonian, Congress placed on the Board of Regents the responsibility for the choice of a site and for the erection of a building to be the home of the Institution. Before the Smithsonian Building was finished, he had written a book entitled Hints on Public Architecture in which both Grace Church and the Smithsonian structure were handsomely depicted. The completion of the building was attended by a series of headaches, which Henry took pains to elaborate in his annual reports. In the 1950s, during the Institution's program of exhibits renovation, many of the exhibition halls in the building were modernized and drew record crowds of visitors. Quarter-century elapsed before the Institution got its third building, which was known as the "new" National Museum. The new building promised to provide a safer depository for some of the real treasures of the American people in the realms of biology, anthropology, geology, and all the subdivisions thereof.
