Sit down and veg

Should you ever need to take load off, Room 305b at the Hirshhorn is a good place to start. The Hirsh is the Smithsonian’s contemporary art museum. Experimental and current in a city of beige trench coats and blue shirt/khaki pants combos. The Hirsh has no First Ladies’ Gowns or Hope Diamond, which translates to more galleries than visitors. You can’t miss it when you walk by. It’s round, basically tubular in form. Observed from the Mall it appears to be wearing a space-age visor – 3D on the landscape. That visor is precisely Room 305b, dedicated to the memory of Abraham Lerner. From in looking out, there is the Mall Panorama. On the left, the Castle, the Washington Monument, the Postal Building clock tower, the Natural History (here resides the Hope Diamond), the National Archives (here resides the Declaration of Independence), the National Gallery (here resides Ginevra, Mona Lisa’s first cousin), the Capitol Building (you know who resides here). And there, for your comfort, is a ring of low slung couches, creased and loungy, grey/black and clubby, dissolute as much as it is possible for furniture to be in a pristine white gallery smack in the middle of monumentality.