HIRSHHORN MUSEUM, Sculpture Garden

The little garden that you find in front of the Hirshhorn Museum when crossing Jefferson Avenue is a really charming place.

Here you can admire some of the most important sculptures from contemporary art, nestled between trees and flowers. Without a doubt, the most stunning is the Needle Tower by the American sculptor Kenneth Snelson. Eighteen meters high, it is constructed solely from aluminum tubes and steel cables. If you are wondering how it manages to withstand the wind, well the explanation can be found in a complicated physical principle called Tensegrity, developed by the American engineer Buckminster Fuller.

If you walk underneath it and look up, you’ll be able to see the shape of the Star of David, however the sculptor often uses a six-point star in his works, without it having any symbolic meaning.

Don't miss the Wish Tree of Yoko Ono, the only one remaining out of the ten that the wife of John Lennon planted in the city during the 2007 Cherry Blossom Festival.

It is inspired by the Japanese tradition of entrusting the realization of a dream to a tree and you will be given a pen and paper if you also want to hang your own note....