Day 15 in Richmond was another scorching, close-to-100-degree day. While we had managed to be outside for the past few days, today we needed an indoor break. We went in search of a museum we had spied during our Monument Avenue hunting expedition.

The Virginia Center for Architecture is housed in a gorgeous Tudor-style home built in 1919 for banker John Kerr Branch and his wife. The building was designed by architect John Russell Pope who is known for designing several prominent Washington area structures including the Jefferson Memorial. The Branch’s used the home as a private residence. It was a second home for them and they lived there only a few months out of the year. The home was decorated with Renaissance tapestries while they lived there. Today, it is an architecture museum.

The current exhibition was called “Mutations: The DNA of 20th Century Design.” The exhibit was designed in conjunction with students from Virginia Commonwealth University and highlighted 20th century achievements in architecture, fashion design and graphic design. (My little sis would have LOVED to see this.)

The curators broke the 20th century into 10-year blocks of time and created a large poster and “sketchbook” for each time period, highlighting an architect, graphic designer and fashion designer from that period. There were no original artifacts but there were nicely reproduced photographs of their work.

Some of the designers profiled that piqued my interest included:

• Paul Poiret – who was a pioneer in the marketing, conception and execution of modern fashion, connecting it to popular culture
• Walter Gropius + The Bauhaus – this hotbed of German designers fled Nazi persecution with about half of them relocating to the United States and influencing design practices here
• Le Corbusier – and his belief that people in densely populated cities needed fresh air and daylight, designing rooftop gardens in this aim
• Madeleine Vionnet – “Queen of the Bias Cut”
• Herbert Bayer – who designed only with lowercase letters for “compositional simplicity and purity”
• Ludwig Mies van der Rohe – famous for his extreme simplicity and quotes “Less is More” and “God is in the details.”
• Saul Bass – an innovative graphic designer who created many famous corporate logos including those for the Girl Scouts and United Way as well as classic movie posters
• Louis I. Kahn – an architect who infused “muscular poetics” in his architecture. His looked for where objects and activities needed to be. For example, in a design for the Phillips Exeter Academy Library, he wanted “searching for knowledge” to occur in the most public spaces.
• Massimo Vignelli – the graphic designer behind all of the National Park Service maps and brochures we use today.
• Stefan Sagmeister – a current graphic designer whose work embodies 2013 life. The main page of his website is a live feed of designers working in his design studio in New York.

There was a lot of dense reading in this exhibit. My son’s patience was tested but he did quite well. His two favorite parts of the exhibit were the timeline graphic showing events in world history and the art world’s response (or non-response) to those events and the fireplace knobs.

We roamed the spacious back garden for a bit and then got in the car to head to a spot for lunch and afternoon touring.

I decided to head back to Meadow Farm to see if we could tour the Sheppard farmhouse that was closed on our prior visit. We were in luck and had a personal tour of the farmhouse, which has been painstakingly furnished to recreate the life of the Sheppard family before the Civil War.

In another building there is a small exhibit space where you can watch a short film about the history of the Sheppard farm, shop in gift shop or view current exhibitions.

After a full week of touring, we were a bit tired and ready for our weekend rest. We picked up the girls from camp and headed home.