Before delving too deep into the National Building Museum’s newly installed mini-golf course, let’s dispense with a few ground rules. There are no windmills or fairy-tale castles. Nor will you find any clowns’ mouths, pirates’ galleons or loop-the-loops.
The Building Museum’s 12-hole course is unlike any other mini-golf setup, chiefly because instead of simply building the same old format of right-angle bank shots and astroturf-carpeted ramps, the museum entrusted the design to a cast of architects and development firms. The resulting addition to the museum is a fun, colorful and wildly imaginative summertime divertissement.
It’s also madly challenging. One hole begins, rather disarmingly, with a bridge that casts a graceful arc over the path to the hole and onto a tilted plane intended to funnel the ball into the wide fairway. But cross the bridge too aggressively, and the ball will take a hard bank shot onto the floor. It’s only the first of a many difficult shots, but an omen.
On the third hole, designed to look like the guts of a cell phone with exposed wires and blinking diodes, duffers are given the option of two ramps. The right-hand path courses to a two- or three-stroke solution, but the left side, with its obvious bounce directly into the hole, offers a tantalizing hole-in-one. A DCist writer attempted the ace but, being overwhelmingly right-handed, stubbed his putter on the carpet and did not even succeed at pushing the ball halfway down the ramp. An employee of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which sponsored the hole, admitted the tease of that left-side ramp.
Despite resulting in one of the worst mini-golf scores in recorded history, the Building Museum’s course is not unenjoyable. No where else would such mind-boggling designs be appropriate and, despite the apparent futility, birdies, eagles and holes-in-one are possible on every hole. One player reported acing the course’s most forbidding feature, a Giovanni Piranesi-inspired skateboard ramp with three holes positioned at various inclines.
Some holes were simple tricks of material and geometry, such as a relaxing, poured-concrete spiral or that aggravating half-pipe. But that damned ramp was also among our favorites.
Perhaps the neatest hole was the 10th, designed and sponsored by the global architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, which delivered a topographic representation of the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers constructed on a tableau of more than 200 perfectly square wooden rods and mounted on a color-shifting LED panel.
Our final tally was well over the course’s 30-stroke par, a score that included several six-stroke maximums and various penalties for hitting the ball out-of-play. Still, it’s a refreshing addition to the downtown museum and, at $5 a round ($3 with museum admission), the most thought-provoking mini-golf option in the District limits. Most putt-putt courses simply test one’s patience and mathematic skill. This one will have players considering technology, green spaces, transportation and urban design.
Andrew Wiseman contributed reporting.
