One rainy February afternoon, I toured the building - the culmination of more than two months of scheduling. Maybe the 10th anniversary is the occasion to bring that up and say, ‘Hey, let’s get that done.’ ” “It baffles me that in 10 years, there hasn’t been the will and the funds to do it. “That was such a big item in the board’s mind and the president’s mind,” Safdie told me. He recalls pitches centered on substantial space being allocated to the public, with an entrance directly off the Mall. In 2007, as the building was under construction, Washington Post critic Philip Kennicott noted how its public and private spaces would be “kept hermetically apart in that strange way that Washington manages to be both open to the public and obsessive about hierarchy and privilege.” After its opening, he wrote that “the building feels closed off from the city,” with the best views belonging to the elite, while the public is “kept to the ground floor and the basement, where the exhibition space will expand after funding comes through.”Ī decade later, the failure to establish such an exhibition space surprises and disappoints Moshe Safdie, the building’s American Canadian Israeli architect, who says he was “very involved” in donor presentations. It seems worth asking whether an institution that accepts those federal funds should be doing more to engage the public.

Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), Chip Cravaack (R-Minn.) and Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) to defund it, with Chaffetz and Weiner writing in the Wall Street Journal that the institute was “a case study in how government waste thrives.” Today it receives about $45 million in annual congressional funding. The institute survived a 2011 attempt by then-Reps. As with many federal initiatives, the Peace Institute - which was established by Congress in 1984 as an independent center, and in 2011 moved into its current headquarters - has experienced controversy and wrangling over funding.

Peace through power kane