They are composed of common brick faced with pressed brick, decorative masonry, and ornamental terra cotta. The exterior walls are load-bearing brick, measuring 75 feet high and 2 feet 4 inches thick. The lower exterior facades are modeled after Antonio da Sangallo's Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Massive in size and scale, the Italianate Renaissance Revival building is twenty-seven bays long on the north and south elevations and thirteen bays wide on the west and east elevations. The red-brick building, measuring 400 feet by 200 feet, occupies the entire city block bounded by Fourth, Fifth, F, and G Streets, N.W., in downtown Washington, DC. The monumental Pension Building was a technological achievement at the time of its construction in 1882 and a fitting tribute to those who served in the Civil War.

The National Building Museum opened in 1985, the same year the building was designated a National Historic Landmark. In 1980 an Act of Congress designated the Pension Building as the site of a new museum celebrating American achievements in the building arts. In 1969 it was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Public perceptions of the building began changing in the late 1950s when an exhibition by the American Institute of Architects promoted it as worth preservation. By 1950, when GAO moved into its own modern facility, the Pension Building was considered obsolete and demolition was contemplated. An approved expansion plan was abandoned due to concern that an enlarged Pension Building would reduce space for growth of the nearby Courts.

General Accounting Office (GAO) took over the building. Veterans Administration in 1930, the U.S. When the Pension Bureau became part of the U.S. Others did not agree, disparaging it as 'Meigs's old red barn.' Responsible for such important engineering feats as the Capitol Dome, Meigs considered the Pension Building to be his greatest achievement. Seeking to create a light and airy environment for federal workers, Meigs incorporated numerous ingenious engineering innovations into the structure, his last project. In commemoration of those heroes, Caspar Buberl (1834-1899) sculpted a 1200-foot terra cotta frieze depicting the Union's Army and Navy.Ĭonstruction began in 1882 and ended in 1887. Meigs envisioned the building as both office space and as a monument to those who died fighting in the Civil War. Army and a graduate of West Point, to develop a fireproof building for the Pension Bureau. Meigs (1816-1892), Quartermaster of the U.S. From 1887- 1926, the Pension Bureau distributed $8,300,000 in benefits to 2,763,063 veterans (and their survivors) of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Civil War. The Pension Building, now the National Building Museum, stands as a memorial to Civil War veterans.

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