Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Stand still for a moment and look up. Above you, a huge ring of pale concrete floats on four thick piers. The surface feels rough, almost sandy, and it holds a faint warm tint in the sunlight. Underneath, the air is cooler and the sounds of the National Mall go quiet. You hear footsteps, a distant fountain, and the wind moving around a curved wall. This is the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian's home for modern and contemporary art.

Most buildings on the Mall try to look permanent and classical. They use columns, domes and white marble. This one does something else entirely. It is a cylinder, lifted off the ground, with almost no windows on its outer face. Washingtonians gave it nicknames almost as soon as it opened in 1974. Some called it the doughnut. Others called it a giant drum or a concrete spaceship. The nicknames were not always kind... but they stuck, and many people now say them with real affection.

The architect was Gordon Bunshaft of the firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Bunshaft was known for bold, simple shapes in glass and stone. Here he made a building that turns its back on the street and looks inward. The outer wall is closed and calm. The inner wall, facing the open courtyard, has a long band of glass. So the views inside the galleries point toward the centre, toward the fountain, and toward the sky. It is a building that asks you to focus.

Now, here is a detail many visitors miss. The ground where you stand was not empty before. For decades, this site held the Army Medical Museum, a red-brick Victorian building full of medical specimens and military history. That older museum was demolished in the late 1960s to make room for the new one. So a collection about the human body gave way to a collection about the human imagination. The museum habit of this spot is older than the doughnut itself.

The name on the building belongs to Joseph Hirshhorn. His story is part of the reason this place exists. He was born in Latvia and came to the United States as a young child, growing up poor in Brooklyn. As an adult, he made a large fortune in finance and later in uranium mining in Canada. Through all of it, he bought art. He bought with energy and instinct, often directly from artists, and often in great quantity.

In 1966, Hirshhorn gave his collection to the nation. It included thousands of paintings and sculptures, gathered over a lifetime. Several countries and cities had wanted it. He chose Washington, and the Smithsonian agreed to build a museum to hold it. That gift is the foundation of what you see today. Since then, the museum has kept collecting, adding new works by living artists from many parts of the world.

Walk into the central plaza and watch the fountain. It sits off-centre in the courtyard, inside the ring of the building. On a windy day, the water moves and shifts, and the spray drifts across the stone. On a still day, it rises in a clean column. Children often stand at the edge and watch it for a long time. Adults do too, if they are honest. It is one of the calmest places on the whole Mall.

Inside, the galleries follow the curve of the building. You walk in a slow circle, so the next room is always just around the bend. This shape changes how you see art. You cannot take in a whole floor in one look. Instead, works appear one at a time as you move. The lobby on the ground floor was redesigned by the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, with a café and simple, quiet surfaces. Exhibitions upstairs change often, so every visit can feel different.

Now cross Jefferson Drive to the Sculpture Garden. It sits below street level, so as you walk down, the traffic noise falls away. Here you find bronze and stone works set among trees, lawns and walls. Look for Auguste Rodin's The Burghers of Calais. It shows a group of medieval citizens who offered their lives to save their town during a siege. Rodin did not make them heroic. He made them heavy, tired and afraid, and that is why they feel so human.

In the same garden, look for a set of four large bronze reliefs by Henri Matisse, known as The Backs. Each one shows a woman's back, seen from behind. Matisse made them over many years. If you look from the first to the last, the body becomes simpler and flatter each time. It is like watching an artist think in slow motion. Many visitors walk past them quickly. Take a minute here... the change from one to the next is the whole point.

There is also a smaller, gentler work you may find in the garden during the warmer months. It is Yoko Ono's Wish Tree for Washington, D.C. The idea is simple. Visitors write a wish on a small tag and tie it to the branches of a living tree. Over a season, the tree fills with thousands of tiny paper notes. The wishes are later collected and sent on to be kept with others from around the world. It is art you take part in, not only look at.

The garden itself has changed over the years, and its design has been the subject of real public debate. Sugimoto has also worked on plans to reshape it, and some critics wanted the original sunken layout kept as it was. That argument says something about this place. People care about it. A building once mocked as a concrete doughnut is now something many Washingtonians want to protect. Opinions about modern art can change slowly, but they do change.

Before you leave, step back toward the Mall and look at the building one more time. Notice how its round shape stands apart from the straight lines of its neighbours. To one side, museums of flight, history and nature. Here, a closed ring that holds questions rather than answers. As you walk away, listen for the fountain fading behind you, and feel the rough concrete give way to gravel and grass. The art inside will keep changing. The ring will stay right where it is.