Two new museum buildings.

Two recently completed building campaigns that answer completely different needs and represent entirely different philosophies open this month at George Washington's Mount Vernon in Virginia and at the Denver Art Museum in Colorado. The former is one of the most visited house museums in the United States, and the latter is the largest art museum between Chicago and the West Coast.

More than one million people visit Mount Vernon each year, and yet exit surveys showed that when visitors finished touring the house and grounds, they knew only a little more about Washington than they did before they arrived. Extending the time allotted for touring the house was impossible, given the traffic flow problems in historic houses, so the regents of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association determined that they needed to build new facilities. Following a successful $100-million-fund-raising campaign, the Ford Orientation Center and the Donald W. Reynolds Museum and Education Center open to the public on October 27. The two buildings were designed by GWWO Incorporated Architects of Baltimore.

The challenge posed to the architects was to find a way to erect buildings that would least disturb the landscape, which Washington designed and took great pleasure in cultivating. Their solution was to bury 65 percent of the 66,700-square-foot complex under a pasture just outside the main entrance gate, where Hog Island sheep still graze, just as they did in Washington's day. The museum and education center building contains classrooms, twenty-three galleries, and the presidential library of our first leader. Six of the galleries are devoted to the permanent display of more than five hundred objects associated with Washington, his family, and life on his plantation. Many of these, which include books and manuscripts, ceramics, silver, costumes, jewelry, and artifacts from the Revolutionary War, have not been on view before. The interactive displays include computer terminals that give access to more than twenty thousand letters written by Washington. Eleven videos ...