Smithsonian Institution Building

The Smithsonian Institution Building, universally known as 'the Castle,' is the founding home of the world's largest museum, education, and research complex — built on the gift of a British scientist who never once set foot in the country he endowed.

British chemist and mineralogist James Smithson died in 1829, leaving his estate to a nephew with the unusual provision that if the nephew died without heirs, the fortune should pass to the United States 'to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.' Smithson had never visited America, and his motives remain debated, but when his nephew died childless in 1835, more than 100,000 gold sovereigns crossed the Atlantic to Congress. After a decade of debate over how to spend the windfall, Congress chartered the Smithsonian Institution in 1846.

Architect James Renwick Jr., fresh off designing Grace Church in New York, won the competition to design the Institution's first building with a fortress-like design in the Norman Revival style, evoking a medieval castle in dark red Seneca sandstone. Built between 1847 and 1855, the building housed the Smithsonian's earliest laboratories, lecture halls, and natural history collections under its first Secretary, physicist Joseph Henry, who lived in the building's east wing with his family for two decades.

As the Smithsonian's collections and mission outgrew a single structure, later museums rose around the Castle across the National Mall, but it has remained the Institution's symbolic and administrative heart. An 1865 fire gutted its upper floor and destroyed Smithson's papers, and in 1904 his remains were brought from Italy and reinterred in a crypt just inside the Castle's north entrance, returning the Institution's unlikely benefactor to the building his gift created.