Concealment is a necessary skill in espionage, but many of the secrets behind the new International Spy Museum are hidden in plain sight. With its massive structural-steel beams extending upward from the site on L’Enfant Plaza in Washington, D.C., London-based architects Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners conceived a structure that is unlike any in the District.
“Washington, D.C., is a concrete town,” observes Bryan Chun, senior associate at Hickok Cole Architects, the project’s architect-of-record. “You don’t see this type of architecturally expressed structural steel anywhere in the city.”