Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a minister and African American civil rights leader. On August 18, 1963, he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. A plaque…

Douglas Cardinal (Blackfoot), Johnpaul Jones (Cherokee/Choctaw), Lou Weller (Cado), Donna House (Diné/Oneida), and Ramona Sakiestewa (Hopi) were consultants on the concept and design of the National Museum of the American Indian. They represented a…

McMillan was a US Senator from Michigan who led the Senate Park Commission in creating a new design plan for Washington's public spaces, including the National Mall. The work and plan of the Senate Park Commission is often referred to by McMillan's…

Glenna Goodacre is the designer and sculptor of the Vietnam Women's Memorial, dedicated in November 1993. Goodacre wanted the memorial's figures to show despair, dedication, and hope of the nurses and servicewomen serving in Vietnam.

In 1850, President Millard Fillmore commissioned landscape architect, Andrew Jackson Downing to landscape the Mall. His design divided the Mall into four smaller parks, each with a unique appearance, connected by curving walks. Downing was an…

L'Enfant was an architect and civil engineer chosen by President George Washington in 1791 to survey and design the new federal city of Washington. L'Enfant designed streets in a grid pattern, and he placed major government buildings and parks in the…

Benjamin H. Latrobe was an architect hired by President Thomas Jefferson to serve as the Surveyor of Public Buildings in 1803. He spent nearly 14 years in Washington supervising the construction and design of public buildings. His largest project was…

Olmsted Jr. was a landscape architect appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt to serve on the Senate Park Commission in 1901. The Commission was charged with improving the Mall's design and restoring elements of Pierre Charles L'Enfant's original…

Maya Lin won the design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1981. She was an undergraduate student majoring in architecture at Yale University when her design was chosen from nearly 1,500 entries. She proposed an abstract design in the…

Built between 1904 and 1908 to house the US Department of Agriculture, the Whitten Building is the only non-public structure on the National Mall. The Whitten building is joined to the South Building by a pedestrian bridge over Independence Avenue.…