Try as I might, I can’t remember how to fold a paper page to make one of them. That was my first reflection on seeing a host of mirrored fortunetellers hanging in the National Building Museum’s Great Hall: I’ve lost touch with an ancient source of wisdom.

About two dozen of these oversize playground prognosticators are on view as part of “Look Here,” the latest in the museum’s annual Summer Block Party installations. After a pandemic pause, the Building Museum has picked up where things left off, mounting a spectacular summer folly to activate its cavernous Great Hall. (Amazon is the presenting sponsor of “Look Here,” and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

This constellation of mirrored children’s toys reminds me that I’m getting older. But the museum’s spectacle series is also showing its age.

The fortunetellers are the work of New York-based architect Suchi Reddy, whose firm Reddymade produces public artworks in addition to jewel-box homes and boutique interiors. For “Look Here,” she has suspended fortunetellers as well as triangular prisms, all clad in a polished aluminum material called Luminux, over a raised platform in the center of the museum’s atrium. Viewers ascending to the platform along twin ramps might feel as if they’re walking into a kaleidoscope or carnival funhouse.

At the center of this platform stands a sort of mini-pavilion that Reddy describes as a “Kaaba,” referring (playfully) to the structure at the heart of Islam and the holiest site in Mecca. Reddy’s construction is a rhomboid-shaped black box, with windows and mirrors that provide views inside and then scatter them. A nondenominational spirituality suffuses her installation, something that would have once been called New Age-y but today might be better described as a vibe.

On the mirrored surfaces of some of those fortunetellers, Reddy has added photographic images of protests, drawing from iconic civil rights-era images as well as more recent clashes in the wake of the death of George Floyd. With these photo applications, the fortunetellers turn into portals to the past and present — losing and gaining something in the process.

It’s a gesture that asks viewers to reflect on themselves, which is a cheeky way to do a hall of mirrors. That’s in keeping with the more socially conscious approach to architecture practiced by Reddy, whose progressive studio work is guided by principles of design justice and neuroaesthetics: the study of the neural effect of artistic contemplation. (The architect’s motto is “form follows feeling.”) Her installation feels, if not exactly somber, then sober: the serious kind of fun encouraged by cultural institutions in the wake of important social reckonings.

After all, “Look Here” takes a step back from the pure realm of play of past Building Museum spectacles such as Bjarke Ingels Group’s plywood labyrinth (“The BIG Maze”) or Snarkitecture’s minimalist ball pit (“The Beach”). One can imagine enjoying a meditative sound bath next to Reddy’s Kaaba while being gently irradiated by the twinkling light of prisms overhead (programming the Building Museum has lined up all summer). But even unguided play here is meant to count as doing the work, so to speak.

There’s something incongruous about this approach to the series. For as long as the Building Museum has hosted these summer installations (BIG’s maze kicked things off in 2014), they’ve served as a magnet for parents with children and young people on dates. Families and youths — especially Washingtonians — don’t lack for opportunities to seek visibility and accountability. It’s not unwelcome for the Building Museum to embrace such vital issues, or for a New York architect to frame D.C. in the political abstract. But the museum’s summer design series served up a kind of low-cost, high-concept silliness that was in short supply in the city even before the layered crises of the last few years.

Escape has always been the promise and the challenge of the Building Museum’s Summer Block Parties. It’s no mean feat to take over the building’s full-height atrium: Framed by 75-foot-tall Corinthian columns, the gargantuan room swallows up anything smaller than a catered gala ball. Reddy navigates this problem by scattering the sight lines: All the mirrored satellites help to fold the space in on itself. Not unlike the action of folding thumb and forefinger in-then-out, perhaps.

The secrets of the fortuneteller’s folds, as I dimly recall, are supposed to run up against the limits of possibility: Living in a shack with your best friend and a googolplex of children between you was always a destiny dangerously close to hand. Reddy’s installation, by contrast, is more severe, a fortune limned by the threat of history, the dull side of the mirror pressing up against the surface. The feeling doesn’t line up with the form.

National Building Museum, 401 F St. NW. 202-272-2448. nbm.org.

Admission: $10; $7 for seniors, students and children age 3 to 17; free for members.