BIG was invited to design the temporary summer installation at The National Building Museum in Washington D.C. The giant sky lit Great Hall, carried by eight 75 ft marble columns is used for events throughout the year and tends to go quiet in the summer months.

The museum’s leadership asked BIG to look into creating a maze for the museum’s summer guests. Instead of a traditional maze, where visitors get lost as they move deeper into the labyrinth, BIG proposed to invert the traditional maze experience for a grand reveal upon reaching the center of it.

Playing with the height of the walls, BIG replaced the monotony of evenly extruded barriers with a variation in height to block or open views. A cone is subtracted from the solid of maze creating a central valley surrounded by sloping hills in all directions.

As visitors journey through the 57×57 ft maze the variation in height transforms the proportion of the corridors from narrow canyons to open valleys – from the back alley to the central square.

From outside, the BIG Maze’s cube-like form hides the final reveal behind its 20-foot-tall walls. On the inside, the walls slowly descend towards the center which concludes with a grand reveal – a 360 degree understanding of your path in and how to get out. The maze attracted more than 50,000 visitors over the course of 3 months.