Engineering, Building, and Architecture - Overview Not many
museums collect houses. The National Museum of American History
has four, as well as two outbuildings, 11 rooms, an elevator,
many building components, and some architectural elements from
the White House. Drafting manuals are supplemented by many
prints of buildings and other architectural subjects. The
breadth of the museum's collections adds some surprising objects
to these holdings, such as fans, purses, handkerchiefs,
T-shirts, and other objects bearing images of buildings. The
engineering artifacts document the history of civil and
mechanical engineering in the United States. So far, the Museum
has declined to collect dams, skyscrapers, and bridges, but
these and other important engineering achievements are preserved
through blueprints, drawings, models, photographs, sketches,
paintings, technical reports, and field notes.