When Andrew Carnegie established his institution for discovery in 1902, he left to the trustees and administrators the task of organizing and running it.  In 1905, the trustees passed a resolution to construct a new building, a structure that would reflect the quality and excellence of the institution’s work and symbolize its permanence in the nation’s capital.  They engaged John Carrére and Thomas Hastings, architects trained in the Beaux Arts style, to design a building “as nearly fire-proof as practicable,” and with ventilation good enough “so that life in it may be tolerable during a tropical summer.” Carrére and Hastings were among the most prominent architects of the time, indeed of the century.  Their sophisticated legacy includes the landmark New York Public Library (1897), the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C., and the Russell Senate and Cannon House Office Buildings on Capitol Hill. 

Andrew Carnegie believed the institution should be known for the grandeur of its work, not the grandeur of its surroundings.  In keeping with a limited budget, and to appease Mr. Carnegie's objections to a grand edifice, the drawings for the new building underwent several revisions, becoming less monumental with each one.  Nonetheless, the architects managed to maintain a sense of elegance and proportion commensurate with the building's location on one of the grand thoroughfares of the city.  The authors of Sixteenth Street Architecture, a book published by the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, in 1988, place the building among the most distinguished on Sixteenth Street.