September 9, 2009
Dear Coalition Friends:
Benjamin Forgey, former architecture critic for The Washington Post, critiques the latest federal plans for central Washington and the National Mall in this essay in Washington Business Journal.
His conclusion?
"How do you convince people to create an inspired city without a vision that genuinely inspires? I don’t know exactly how to answer that question, but business as usual is not acceptable.
Maybe some outside help is in order. The National Coalition to Save Our Mall has long called for the convening of an outside commission of brilliant folks to consider the issues facing the nation’s symbolic center. Perhaps the concept ought to be broadened to include the whole of central Washington, and the commission idea expanded to include just about everyone: a series of televised presentations and town meetings across the land to entice ideas and encourage enthusiasm. I bet the response would be terrific. I bet a great majority of Americans would say, yes, we want only the very best for our capital."
WASHINGTON BUSINESS JOURNAL
On Site
by Benjamin Forgey
Friday, August 14, 2009 Could this be yet another golden age of planning for central Washington? Could we be experiencing a birth of ideas that will push the capital city — so great in many ways, so lacking in others — to become an inspiring model for the 21st century?
Even to ask such daring questions suggests that the answers might be yes. But, alas, though the air is rich with possibilities, the promised land is not yet in view. Intimations, yes. Probabilities, no.
First, of course, there was Pierre L’Enfant, the great 18th century visionary. Then, not much more than 100 years later, came the famed McMillan Commission, which envisioned the stupendous Mall pretty much as we know it today. And now, with not much more than another century gone by, we are witnessing a grand collaborative effort that, alas, falls short.
There are, indeed, lots of plans and lots of positives. The National Park Service is completing a long-needed new strategy to care for and rejuvenate the Mall. The National Capital Planning Commission, with the close collaboration of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, has worked long and hard on a complementary document with a sonorously ambitious title, “Reimagining Washington’s Monumental Core.” The city’s revamped Office of Planning last year unveiled its Center City Action Agenda, covering much of the same terrain.
These three plans (plus potentially a fourth being prepared by the Architect of the Capitol) follow up in a focused way on several impressive federal and local planning initiatives of recent years. The NCPC’s “Extending the Legacy” plan of 1997 set the stage by proposing that future monuments, memorials, museums and other cultural attractions be placed outside the traditional “monumental core.” The NCPC’s Memorials and Museums Master Plan of 2001 helpfully suggested 100 specific locations for such installations although, so far, takers have been few.
Building on these foundations, the three most recent plans take aim directly at the center. In so doing, they pointedly address a major flaw in Washington’s makeup: the long-standing separation of the great National Mall from the city that surrounds it, a separation that has both psychological and physical dimensions. The goal, as summed up in the city’s Action Agenda, is nothing less than a “new definition of Center City (extending) well beyond the traditional downtown … positioning the National Mall at the center, rather than at the southern edge. This constitutes a major shift in our mental map and presents a great opportunity … .” It certainly does. Such a change would be huge and magnificent.
As for the Mall itself, in particular the great greensward extending from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, the intention is that it remain much the same, only better. The Park Service proposal, at least as seen in the “preliminary preferred alternative” unveiled earlier this year, is basically a sensible, desperately necessary long-term maintenance plan. As sensational as it still looks from, say, an east-facing window of a plane cruising south along the Potomac toward National Airport, the great lawn from a closer view is tired, worn, even crumbling. Many improvements are proposed along the two-mile stretch in the form of better drainage, more benches, more and better places to rest and eat. All needed, all welcome.
One exception to the rule of rather low-key changes is a thorough transformation foreseen for the Mall’s eastern terminus at the foot of Capitol Hill. Gone, the wide reflecting pool now overlooked by the equestrian statue of a somber Gen. Ulysses Grant. Present, in a vision that harks back to an unbuilt section of the McMillan Commission plan, is “a symmetrical and formally laid out civic square.” The main reason for the proposal, I suspect, is to provide relief for the grass and trees of the Mall, especially during large First Amendment demonstrations — a good reason. This is an ideal location for a beautifully designed civic square.
As bad as they are, conditions on the Mall are readily fixable, given the will and the money (not small hurdles, as we’ve witnessed over the years). By contrast, conditions in areas surrounding the Mall are of different orders of complexity and awfulness. An ironic benefit of reading through these plans with their big ambitions is to sharpen one’s awareness of just how dysfunctional and misbegotten are enormous chunks of central Washington.
The spaghetti of freeway ramps wasting acres of space in front of the Kennedy Center: abominable. The street-life-killing fortified fortress of the FBI Building on Pennsylvania Avenue NW: awesome bad news. The neoclassical phalanx of Federal Triangle buildings separating the Mall from the (real) city: beautiful but lamentable. The deflating federal office compound south of the Mall between Third and 15th streets SW: ugly and lamentable. The railroad tracks disfiguring Maryland Avenue and large portions of the Southwest: horrendous. The unurbane, anti-urban, life-deflating Southwest waterfront: ridiculous. The concrete ribbon of the Southeast/Southwest freeway blockading neighborhoods from each other: city-stifling, car-mad.
Fortunately, the authors of both the federal and local plans being considered here clearly recognize these and other structural deficiencies of the city as it stands today, and both propose sensible and even exciting correctives. They also point out, rather politely, that it was planners of bygone eras who helped mightily to create these disasters — the 1920s classicists, the single-use zoners from the ’20s on and the post-World War II automobile optimists.
Both sides recognize the pressing need to substitute a sense of place for the prevailing placelessness and to eradicate or at least minimize visual and physical barriers between attractive new places and the old, existing ones such as the Mall.
A good example of how the plans reinforce each other is in Southwest. The feds propose to liven up the dead, 1960s-era passage of 10th Street, which now leads from somewhere (the Castle on the Mall) to nowhere (the underused Banneker overlook). Down would go the view-blocking Forrestal Building along Independence Avenue. Up would go new infill buildings and retail on both sides of 10th Street. The overlook would be dramatically improved by an “iconic cultural destination” and a cascade of stairs leading down to the Southwest waterfront. Here, the city would step in with a dramatic new public-private collaboration, including high-density residences and offices, enticing parks and active waterside attractions. The feds then up the ante by proposing several bridges linking the waterfront to East Potomac Park across the Washington Channel and envisioning a new waterway cut through the park, linking the Channel to the Potomac River.
These are excellent ideas. The two plans reflect a growing national consensus in the planning and design communities: They embrace mixed-use destination centers, increased density, ground-floor retail (including the street frontage of many federal buildings), expanded public and private transportation systems (with plenty of water transport along the Potomac and Anacostia rivers) and heightened sustainability. Both plans are replete with suggestions on ways to make things happen in specific locations. No question, if all or even most of these suggestions were to become reality, the result would be a greatly improved capital city. But not as great as it could or should be.
Both plans are visually and verbally uninspiring. They are filled with the kind of soft-focus watercolor illustrations that are unconvincing when not actually scary. In the framework plan, the illustration envisioning the 10th Street of the future shows off-putting office building architecture framing a long, long walk that few real-life people would ever bother with. Superficially nice, it is really pretty grim. As for the words, despite elevated sentiments, there is just too much hemming and hawing, as if the plans’ creators were overawed by the real-world difficulties of getting anything to happen in Washington, much less a “major shift in our mental map.”
These deficiencies are not mere superfice. They reflect a failure, more prominent in the federal plan, to come to grips with the fact that true neighborhoods are the necessary building blocks of great cities. To create true neighborhoods in many of the districts covered by these plans would require putting lots of residents in both old and new buildings, with all the attendant urban services. In particular, it would require the breakup and genuine diversification of those single-use federal office compounds, including the Federal Triangle.
In a recent public forum D.C. Planning Director Harriet Tregoning asked, “How radical would it be to look at every federally owned property to see what potential there might be for housing?” Good question. The framework plan includes hints in this direction. Among other things, it gently suggests doing away with the FBI fortress “in the long term.” But it does not unambiguously commit to building identifiable, workable, genuine neighborhoods.
This is a big, big lack. So is the failure directly to confront the infrastructure barriers of the railroads and the freeways. These were 19th and 20th century mistakes that surely ought to be corrected in any enlightened vision of our 21st century future. The framework plan merely calls for some minor shifting and lots of decking, a step back from the Legacy Plan of a decade ago, which advocated moving the rails altogether and replacing the Southwest freeway with an attractive urban boulevard.
My criticism, then, boils down to a single question: How do you convince people to create an inspired city without a vision that genuinely inspires? I don’t know exactly how to answer that question, but business as usual is not acceptable.
Maybe some outside help is in order. The National Coalition to Save Our Mall has long called for the convening of an outside commission of brilliant folks to consider the issues facing the nation’s symbolic center. Perhaps the concept ought to be broadened to include the whole of central Washington, and the commission idea expanded to include just about everyone: a series of televised presentations and town meetings across the land to entice ideas and encourage enthusiasm. I bet the response would be terrific. I bet a great majority of Americans would say, yes, we want only the very best for our capital.
Ben Forgey, former architecture critic for The Washington Post, writes regularly for On Site. Read his past columns as washingtonbusinessjournal.com.
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