What is the future of the built environment? The National Building Museum in Washington, DC, where AFIRE members tour this week during our Winter Conference, is a museum about the world we design and build. The museum’s exhibits celebrate building architecture, design, engineering, construction—and the act of urban planning. But most of all, it’s a showcase for the imagination and ambitions of those who help create what we call real estate. In this podcast, AFIRE CEO Gunnar Branson interviews James Ball, the National Building Museum’s director of future cities, about the past, present and future of the structures we exist in every day. This conversation is geared to people who invest in developing buildings around the world.

LINKS

To hear the globe’s top experts discuss opportunities in US property markets, register for future AFIRE conferences:

Winter Conference 2026 in Washington, DC

https://www.afire.org/events/wc2026/

Summer Conference 2026 in Tokyo

https://www.afire.org/events/tokyo26/

Find the National Building Museum on the web here:

https://nbm.org/

Ball discusses the NBM’s new exhibit, Coming Together:

https://nbm.org/exhibitions/coming-together/

The NBM’s online initiative, I Hope This Becomes:

https://ihopethisbecomes.nbm.org/

Discussed during the episode was Donella Meadows, the environmental scientist behind The Limits of Growth:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donella_Meadows

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 Introductions

01:30 What is the National Building Museum?

03:05 Role of built environment in society

05:30 History of the building that houses the NBM

07:58 How our built world shapes us

09:41 Future of the city

11:50 Starchitect fallacy and the genius theory of urban planning

14:44 New NBM exhibit: Coming together

18:02 Destructive development narratives

21:20 How to make buildings beautiful

23:50 Museums’ role in real estate

26:01 Role of the building user

28:25 City as a multi-generational yet still incomplete project

30:25 Message to building industry

33:50 New moment in city building

35:18 AFIRE visits the NBM

36:20 Wrap up