Photo by Rebecca Fishbein
Last weekend, the National Building Museum debuted its much-anticipated summer exhibition the BEACH, transforming their Great Hall into a 10,000 square all-white beach scene complete with a ball pit ocean and umbrella-ed beach chairs. I stopped by on Sunday while visiting friends in D.C., and discovered that adulthood does not destroy one’s inner ball-pit sourced bliss.
The BEACH, like most museum summer spectacles that have come before it, is instantly Instagrammable. This is great news if you want to make your friends jealous by posting photos of yourself set against a backdrop of stark white, or buried under the three-foot-deep “water”, or pelting the child who just stole your reclining seat with balls. You will not get stuck in traffic while trying to travel to this beach, though you may have to wait in line once you’re there—you will also not a get a sunburn, and you will (probably) not get stung by a Man O’ War, although who knows at this point, because those suckers are EVERYWHERE.
In favor of full disclosure, I went to the BEACH after indulging in an all-you-can-drink brunch. I live in New York, and though there are some New Yorkers who frequently participate in this kind of activity, I am not one of them. D.C. did me in, and indeed, my heavily-mimosa-ed brain led me to succumb fully to the soothing sensation of sinking deep into a pit of translucent balls.
Sufficiently submerged, I awoke after many, many minutes to find a small child staring down at me. “Are you alright?” it asked, having presumably never seen a grown-up person take a nap in public before. I am your future, kid. I also discovered that during my nap, my friends had engaged in a vicious, perhaps even violent ball-throwing war with a group of seven year-olds. We were not the only post-brunch crew at the BEACH, as it appeared many other semi-adult individuals had imbibed before entering the museum, and almost all of them were having trouble standing up in the pit. Note that the BEACH plans to serve beer and wine on Wednesday evenings, so expect these scenes of public intoxication to recur frequently in the future!
Anyway. You should go to the BEACH, which is on view through Labor Day and costs $16 to attend ($10 for members). Now please enjoy this timelapse showing the BEACH being built, before the children and tourists descended:
