Dumbarton Oaks

Dumbarton Oaks is a historic estate in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington DC, formally the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. The land was part of a grant made by Queen Anne in 1702. Around 1801 the first house was built, and in the mid-nineteenth century it was enlarged and named The Oaks. Senator and Vice President John C. Calhoun lived there between 1822 and 1829.

Robert Woods Bliss, a U.S. diplomat, and his wife Mildred Barnes Bliss bought the property in 1920 and gave it its present name in 1933. Architect Frederick H. Brooke turned the Italianate house into a Colonial Revival residence, and landscape architect Beatrix Farrand worked with Mildred Bliss on a series of terraced gardens and a wilderness. The grounds grew to about 54 acres. In 1940 the couple gave the house and about 16 acres to Harvard University, and some 27 acres to the National Park Service, now Dumbarton Oaks Park.

The Blisses built up a large collection of art and reference books, which became the core of the library and collection. Two pavilions were built in 1938 for their Byzantine collection and an 8,000-volume library, and in the early 1960s two new wings were added: one for the Pre-Columbian collection, designed by Philip Johnson, and one for the garden library. In 2005 a gardeners' court and a new library designed by Robert Venturi were added, and in 2008 the main house and museum wing were renovated.

In 1937 Mildred Bliss commissioned Igor Stravinsky to write a concerto for the couple's thirtieth wedding anniversary. It premiered in the music room in 1938 and is known as the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto. In the late summer and fall of 1944, delegations from China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States met here to discuss an organization to keep world peace. Their meetings led to the United Nations Charter, adopted in San Francisco in 1945. Today the institute supports research in Byzantine and Pre-Columbian studies and in garden and landscape architecture.