WHAT makes a house a home? The lives lived in it, of course. The relationship between people and their homes, sometimes passionate, sometimes indifferent, confounding or fraught, is the subject of “House & Home,” an exhibition that opened Saturday at the National Building Museum here.

In photographs, films, models, timelines and nearly 200 artifacts (including a pink flamingo lawn ornament, a tortilla press, an early Apple home computer and a vibrator from the 1920s), all spread among six galleries, the show gamely asks some of the big questions: How have government policies shaped who lives where over time? Why do houses look the way they do? How does architecture affect individuals? How does it shape neighborhoods? What do we do at home? What is housework? What is play? And, finally, how do our homes express who we are, as well as who we’d like to be?

“Many of us are familiar with the idea that our houses are reflections of our personality,” said Thomas Mellins, an architectural historian and independent curator, who organized the exhibition with Donald Albrecht, curator of architecture and design at the Museum of the City of New York, and Sarah Leavitt, a curator at the museum.

“In America,” Mr. Mellins continued, “we are very connected to this idea of individuality. Even if we do inherit a place to live, we are interested in personalizing it and having it express our innermost thoughts, desires, aspirations. What is less obvious or less known to most Americans is the way in which their houses reflect major economic changes, government policy, technological advances and consumer culture.”

First, the setting. The National Building Museum lives in a brick palazzo-style monument that was built after the Civil War to do two things: house the United States Pension Bureau and hold events like inaugural balls. It’s been the home of the museum since 1980, a place to tell stories about the built environment.

This being Washington, it is a monument with a capital M. It is mostly all atrium, a thunderously large interior with gargantuan Corinthian columns, a spectacular party space indeed (or an end-of-the-party space: Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered her concession speech here in 2008). The galleries live on the second floor, up wide and worn brick stairs (a gentle angle that was intended to accommodate Civil War soldiers on crutches). Having been walloped over the head with so much architecture, you have to recalibrate your eye to these more diminutive spaces, which at first feel underwhelming.

The show begins pictorially, with two gallery walls blanketed with images harvested from the American Memory Association, historical societies, the Historic American Buildings Survey, and the Flickr universe. If the traditional American house is a single-family unit, these photographs show that, in reality, we are perhaps more likely to be living in public housing, penitentiaries, military barracks, gated communities and, yes, mansions, herded there by government policies both beneficial and devastating. There’s Graceland; a relocation center in California; the bungalows of the Rockaways; slave quarters on a Georgia plantation; a branded house by Martha Stewart for KB Homes; a West Virginia mining company’s housing; and a Lustron house.

Nearby, in the center of this first gallery, dollhouses — a stately, chockablock Victorian and a peppy modern dream house designed by an architect for Woman’s Day magazine in 1976 — are outfitted with the decorating totems of the day (an ermine rug in the former, and ethnic masks and low-slung orange sofas in the latter). They make the point that ideas about style and aspiration, and an appetite for shelter magazines, are planted early in life.

The huge collection of American stuff here — cultural artifacts that are by turns curious, kitschy, useful, soulful or disposable — suggests an eBay or flea-market bender. These specimens are organized thematically rather than chronologically, moving from the outside (a Baltimore painted screen door, a push lawn mower) in, and throughout the rooms of the house.

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Here are a few definitions that anyone who wants fluency in New York architecture will find useful.

First, the aforementioned grooves:

FLUTING This is an apt term for shallow vertical channels, usually in a column; where else would you leave your flute? There’s a whole mess of fluting out in Morristown, N.J., where scores of column drums of Westchester marble, salvaged from a demolition site a century ago, lie strewn around like a collapsed project of wooden blocks.

Some of the best fluting in New York is not on a column at all, but the first-floor wall of the estimable 740 Park Avenue. The low, almost flat curves evoke the currents and eddies on the sea bottoms where this limestone was formed.

ORIEL OR BAY? We are speaking of those picturesque bumplike things on a facade, almost always with windows. Sometimes they continue all the way to the ground, sometimes they float in midair.

Here’s the trick: does it rest on its bottom? Then that’s B, for bay. Or, does it stick out from a higher floor on the facade with nothing under it? That’s O for oriel, with zero underneath. There are some great oriels on the 1880s houses on 95th off Park, especially 124 to 128.

One of the highest oriels in New York is on the north side of the Carlyle Hotel, jutting out from Apartment 34A: John F. Kennedy’s breakfast nook.

A particularly striking oriel is one added around 1900 to an old brownstone at 52 East 80th, with copper hammered into intricate shapes. I often imagine what it must be like inside, looking out the French windows from a wide leather seat, where I would take my coffee (light and sweet, please) and read The Times in the morning. And I mean the actual paper.

MANSARD Blame the mansard roof on the 17th-century French designer François Mansart, who gave drama and scale to his architecture by adding a floor with a sloping facade of slate shingles. In New York, it caught on in the mid-1860s, and as early as 1868 The Real Estate Record and Guide complained that mansard fad was pernicious: “the thing becomes so overdone that sheer nausea begets a change.”

Few listened — certainly not Carl Pfeiffer, the architect for the neat little group of mansarded pavilions for what is now Lenox Hill Hospital, at Park and 77th, of the same year.

Seven years later The Record and Guide said there had been no letup: “If the owner is penurious or the architect barren, there is one immediate way to make it known. Let them concoct a mansard.” The mansard has become the lifeline for developers and owners who want to add a floor or two — it offers some nice historical camouflage.

VITRUVIAN WAVE A range of identical wave-tops running along a band named, apparently in the 18th century, after the Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio. “Doing the wave” is a signature move in classical architecture, particularly English design of the late 18th century.

When William Delano brought his customary ingenuity to bear on his 1925 Brook club at 111 East 54th Street, he gave it a special touch: dolphins jumping from crest to crest. Even better is his polychrome band of waves around the Art Deco Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport, with flying fish.

RUSTICATION Do you like your pizza rustica? Then surely you like rustication, blocks of stone cut back at the edges to emphasize their mass. The term is mean to suggest “living in the country” — rustic, crude, undressed stonework. But my favorite is blocks that have been softly cut back with a gentle curve, so they look like giant stone pillows. The Federal Reserve Bank on Liberty Street has rustication like this.

Perhaps the most intense rustication in New York was visited upon the long-demolished house of William A. Clark, at Fifth Avenue and 77th Street. The Architectural Record observed that the building “had as its prototype rather a log-house than any extant construction of masonry.”

VERMICULATION Worms! Or, more precisely, a pattern carved into stone to imitate the twisting, turning tracks that worms make in soil, almost always found on rustication. The 1910 Carrère & Hastings building on Fifth Avenue for Knoedler & Company had perhaps the finest vermiculation in New York. Now the title falls to the 1904 town house at 647 Fifth Avenue; really, it’s entirely new, recreated in a 1996 restoration.

Just why someone thought that the worm- trail pattern was better than $, @, + and other motifs is difficult to answer.

I see I’ve left out parapet, broken pediment and a dozen others — hang on for another day.

E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com

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