New DC Architecture

[Kris]

http://corcoran.org/new_wing/index.htm


November 2001

Gehry Design for Corcoran Takes a Big Step Forward


The site for Gehry's addition, as seen from the fourth floor of the AIA national component headquarters.


The model of the commission-approved design.

The Commission of Fine Arts unanimously approved on October 18 the design for a Corcoran Gallery of Art addition designed by AIA Gold Medalist Frank O. Gehry, FAIA. The milestone is a major one for the project. Because of the site's visual proximity to the White House and the McMillan Plan's monumental corridor in Washington, D.C., the commission's approval of the design is required before the architect can begin design development.

The original 1897 building, designed by Ernest Flagg, dominates the southwest corner of 17th Street and New York Avenue, NW. (At the opposite end of the block are The Octagon House and the AIA national component headquarters.)

"After many productive months of hard work, more than two dozen iterations of the design, and a few engineering setbacks, we believe that this design meets the multifaceted needs of our complex institution, said Corcoran President and Director David C. Levy.

"The design is so simple and pure, it is classic rather than classical," said Commission of Fine Arts Chairman J. Carter Brown.

In his presentation to the commission, Gehry acknowledged proudly the design's divergence from the off-white masonry characteristic of the vast majority of buildings in the area. "My design for the Corcoran, with its prominent location across the street from the White House, has always been to me a statement about artistic freedom, about discovery and the ways in which contemporary ideas move the historic urban fabric forward over the decades if not centuries."

Some changes for the better

The approved design is somewhat less exuberant than the proposal Gehry first presented in June 1999. It is also more practical. Strengthening of the foundation and other engineering requirements to make Gehry's original design workable threatened to put the building $15 million over its $120 million budget.

The new design reorients the entrance to the addition to the New York Avenue side of the site, instead of 17th Street entrance to the original building, where Gehry first proposed it. Although still decidedly a Gehry creation, the plan as accepted also has fewer undulations in its titanium façade.

Gehry likened the design to the sails of a sailboat. "I'm a sailor and I like the sense of movement these elements give," he said. Commission Chairman Brown evoked Matisse cutouts in his praise of the design.

Along with adding exhibition space, the new wing will consolidate the Corcoran College of Art and Design. Founded in 1890, the school is Washington's only four-year college of art and design. When completed, possibly by 2006, the addition will provide Corcoran students with state-of-the-art facilities that still provide the intimacy of a conservatory atmosphere.

The renovation and expansion will optimize the entire Corcoran facility and meet the needs of the institution's unprecedented growth, states the Corcoran's press release on the design. Going underground to provide the space called for in the client's program, the building also provides a central atrium and a "signature new entrance."

—Douglas E. Gordon, Hon. AIA

Copyright 2001 The American Institute of Architects

[Kris]

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

Washington, DC, 2013

Civic/Government, Performing Arts
In Design
40,000 sq meters
(430,560 sq feet)

Model:




Aerial Rendering (Top Left)


The initial concept for this landmark project includes a streamlined plaza, two new curved steel and glass buildings set beside a central fountain that runs from 23rd Street to the Kennedy Center, a pedestrian walkway and connection to the waterfront. Rafael Viñoly will work in collaboration with architects selected by the U.S. Department of Transportation to design and implement a comprehensive plan for the new plaza. The Plaza Project will make the Center more accessible to pedestrians and tie it to the memorial center of Washington, while the new buildings on it will house the Center’s extensive education programs, interactive exhibitions focusing on the performing arts in America and expanded rehearsal and office facilities for the Center and the Washington Opera. The project is part of a plan that includes the construction of a plaza set on top of the Potomac Freeway improving dramatically the access to the Center. The two buildings provide approximately 400,000 square feet of gross building area.

Scheme


Perspectives:




http://www.rvapc.com/ht/HTProject.as...amp;projID=637


http://www.westendguide.us/kennedy0404.htm

www.kennedy-center.org

[Kris]

Building a Native Place on the National Mall


American Indian museum gets prime spot on D.C. mall

Saturday, January 17, 2004

By KAREN MACPHERSON
BLOCK NEWS ALLIANCE

WASHINGTON -- Nearly 15 years in the planning, the National Museum of the American Indian will open Sept. 21 in the last -- and some say the best -- building spot on the National Mall.

The 250,000-square-foot, five-story museum, featuring a spectacularly curved limestone facade and 100-foot-high dome, is located on a prime 4.25-acre site south of the U.S. Capitol. It is just east of the National Air and Space Museum, the nation's most-visited museum, and across from the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art.

The American Indian museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution, will be home to a world-renowned collection of more than 800,000 objects. The collections represent a 10,000-year time span and encompass the work of native peoples from Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America to the Arctic Circle.

Among the museum's holdings are wood, horn and stone carvings from the northwest coast of North America, Navajo weavings and blankets, gold work from Colombia, Mexico and Peru, and painted hides and garments from the North American Plains Indians.

The landscape surrounding the museum will be designed to mimic what the site might have looked like before white settlers arrived in North America more than 500 years ago. The museum's grounds will include hundreds of plantings, 20 to 30 large grandfather rocks and a tumbling stream, said W. Richard West, the museum's founding director.

"I think a case can be made that Native America, as the originating element of American heritage, should have been among the first to be acknowledged with a museum on the National Mall and yet we arrived last," West told reporters at a news conference.

"But in an illuminating act of great symbolism, we now occupy the first or keystone place in America's monumental core ... a placement, at long last, between equals in the political and cultural heart of America," said West, a member of the Southern Cheyenne who was selected in 1990 to lead the museum.

The three inaugural exhibits -- "Our Universes," "Our Peoples" and "Our Lives" -- are designed both to introduce Native American culture to non-natives and to allow natives to celebrate their heritage, West said.

He said the museum will not shy away from subjects such as the effort to eradicate Native American culture in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Construction, which is about 80 percent complete, is expected to be finished in July so the exhibit planners can finish their work in time for the opening. The Sept. 21 opening date was chosen to time the museum's opening to the equinox, or change of the seasons, West said.

On that morning, native communities from throughout the Western Hemisphere are invited to participate in a "Native Nations" procession from the Smithsonian's castle building on the Mall to the front of the Capitol.

Thousands of native peoples, many dressed in their tribal regalia, are expected to participate, led by the Hopi Nation Honor Guard in memory of Lori Piestewa, the first Native American woman to die in combat during the Iraq war.

Once the procession is complete, the hour-long opening ceremonies will begin at noon. The museum then will officially open to the public. West said he expects up to 6 million visitors annually at the museum.

Opening day ceremonies will be followed immediately by a six-day "First Americans Festival," which will include more than 300 Native dancers, storytellers, musicians and comedians. Native foods will be sold, and there will be a marketplace of Native-made goods.

Congress authorized the museum in 1989, nine years after the Smithsonian first initiated the idea of taking over the priceless but poorly housed collection of the Museum of the American Indian in New York City. That museum was founded by George Gustav Heye to showcase the hundreds of thousands of objects he had purchased during his extensive travels among native peoples in North and South America.

As part of the final agreement building the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, Congress agreed to keep a branch of the museum in New York. The George Gustav Heye Center of the National Museum of the American Indian opened in the U.S. Custom House in New York in 1994.

© 1998-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer


http://www.cosmos-club.org/journals/2000/west.html



Way Clear for British Architect's Glass Act

Smithsonian Picks Norman Foster to Design Cover for Old Patent Office Building's Courtyard

By Jacqueline Trescott
Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, March 16, 2004; Page C01


Foster's concept for a glass canopy to enclose the courtyard of the building that houses the American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.

Norman Foster, the esteemed British architect, has been selected to design the huge glass canopy that will enclose the courtyard of the Old Patent Office Building, the Smithsonian announced yesterday.

The building, which is home to the Smithsonian's American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, is undergoing a top-to-bottom renovation. The covering of the courtyard that connects the four sides of the landmark building was an option for the project, which began in 2001, but became a reality after Congress approved the enhancement and prospects for fundraising seemed good.

Foster received the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1999 and the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects in 1994. His designs for the Great Court at the British Museum in London and the Reichstag, the new German parliament building in Berlin, have drawn widespread praise. This will be his first project in Washington.

"He was extremely ingenious in finding ways to create classic elegance and simplicity. It marries well to our noble building, but it feels very modern," Elizabeth Broun, director of the American Art Museum, said, referring to the concept design that Foster submitted.

The courtyard is 28,000 square feet, about a thousand feet smaller than the hall of the National Building Museum. The new enclosure will be a social space for concerts, meetings, art installations and even the parties that made the 19th-century building a center of Washington social life. Abraham Lincoln held inaugural balls there and other important galas were held through the 19th and 20th centuries.

The bulk of the covering will be glass, but other materials will be used to aid acoustics. In one of the concept designs, the ceiling has a wavy, patterned look. "We have longed to have anything new that we put in have the same distinction as the original design," Broun said. "We are conscious of the beauty of the original structure."

The building was the third federal building constructed in Washington, after the Capitol and the White House. Work began in 1836 and was finished in 1867, with American architects Robert Mills and Thomas U. Walter contributing to the Greek Revival design. During the Civil War, when the site was used as an infirmary, poet Walt Whitman worked as a nurse in the halls. In 1962 Congress transferred the building to the Smithsonian.

The federal government has contributed $166 million for the renovation. The Smithsonian has estimated that the entire project will cost $216 million, including the Foster enclosure. Broun said yesterday that $40 million of the private funding has been raised.

The renovation of the building, located at Eighth and F streets NW in the bustling Gallery Place and Penn Quarter neighborhoods, includes additional gallery space, an underground 346-seat auditorium and a conservation lab. Congress approved the enclosure last August.

Broun said the Smithsonian conducted an international search for an architect to design the enclosure, eventually inviting seven finalists to submit concepts.

Foster, 69, has worked extensively around the world, and his designs include the world's largest airport in Hong Kong, the London Millennium Bridge and a scientific research center at Stanford University. His work at the British Museum involved rethinking its famous Round Reading Room. The room now has a classic library feel with a roof of glass and steel, making it the largest enclosed public space in Europe.

He is currently planning the renovation and expansion of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

After Foster completes a final design, the plan will go to the Commission on Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission for approval.

The building is expected to reopen July 4, 2006, the 170th anniversary of the laying of its cornerstone by President Andrew Jackson.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company




http://americanart.si.edu/museum_inf...tion/index.cfm



Large files on both of these Smithsonian projects can be found here.

www.smithsonian.org

[Kris]

The Newseum That Fits

Glass-Fronted Design Reflects Well as Metaphor of a Free Press

By Benjamin Forgey
Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, October 29, 2002; Page C01

The design of the new Newseum, to be unveiled formally at a news conference this morning, is a brash study of contrasts with the august architecture surrounding its prominent Pennsylvania Avenue address.

It is almost all glass where its neighbors are almost all stone. It's transparent where they are opaque, light where they're heavy, breezily informal where they are attired for a decorous sit-down dinner.

And, oh, it comes with a large LED media screen to project up-to-the-minute breaking news and other news-related images -- the equivalent of a giant television set facing the "nation's Main Street."

Designed by Polshek Partnership Architects of New York, the Washington incarnation of the interactive "museum of news" will have three times the amount of exhibition space as the Newseum's first home in Rosslyn, which was closed in March after a successful five-year run.

At least equally important as the added space, however, is the location: Front and center on the inaugural parade route, close by major federal buildings and the cultural institutions of the Mall, the plot of land at Sixth Street NW and Pennsylvania Avenue is of immense symbolic impact.

"This site on Pennsylvania Avenue really opens the door to educating millions of people over the next century about the importance of the First Amendment and a free press," says Charles L. Overby, chairman and CEO of the Freedom Forum, the nonprofit parent to the Newseum.

To emphasize the point, the design features a 60-foot-high plane of stone engraved with the 45 words of the First Amendment -- a sober billboard, in effect, reminding all who pass of the crucial building blocks of the democracy.

This emblem is just about the only part of the front of the building that is not made of glass. Transparency as a metaphor for a free press and an open society was a guiding principle of the design, says James Stewart Polshek, a founder of the Polshek Partnership and leader of the design team.

The intricately layered design consists of three distinct "bars" parallel to Pennsylvania Avenue, each successively higher (up to a maximum of 137 feet). "We thought of these layers as pages of a newspaper," says Polshek architect Robert Young. "Just as you do when reading a newspaper, here you discover more at each layer."

This notion of layers fits with the building's complexity -- the architects were required to squeeze a lot into a relatively compact envelope. In addition to Newseum exhibitions, the building will contain a 500-seat auditorium, a large ground-floor museum store, a second-floor "news cafe" with stunning views of the Capitol, a Freedom Forum conference center with an outdoor terrace overlooking the avenue, a full-service restaurant, and offices for Freedom Forum and Newseum staff.

Contributing to the city's long-term goal of creating a "living downtown," the building also will include, at the rear of the site facing C Street NW, about 100 upscale apartments. The total cost, Overby says, is approximately $400 million -- $250 million for design and construction of the institutional parts of the building, $50 million for the housing units and $100 million for the land.

A key element of the design is what Polshek refers to as a "window on the world." This is a large rectangular opening in the Pennsylvania Avenue facade, through which passersby can see visitors circulating on ramps and bridges in the towering interior atrium. They'll also be able to catch partial glimpses of that 30-by-50-foot media screen, suspended from a pair of bridges about 60 feet above the atrium floor.

At this stage of design, the architects have not yet selected the building's precise materials and finishes. But the general idea, Polshek says, is to sheathe different pieces of the puzzle in different types of glass for both functional and aesthetic reasons.

The "bar" closest to the sidewalk, for instance, will be covered mainly in translucent glass. This will help to frame the huge "window on the world," to be made of an extremely pure, transparent glass like that used by the Polshek Partnership for the exterior walls of the acclaimed Rose Center at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Each of the layers corresponds in a general way to particular functions -- the outer layer is reserved for "extroverted" uses such as the cafe and terrace, and the inner layer for "black box" programs requiring no natural light, such as broadcast studios. But the middle layer is the key: Its main function is to frame that soaring atrium.

Atria have become commonplace in the swollen office buildings of downtown Washington -- they provide interior offices with natural light and views. But the tall, shadowy central spine of the new Newseum is something different: It has the potential to become one of the more dynamic interiors in the world, because visitors will be using it continuously to get from here to there.

Design of the exhibitions, not incidentally, is the responsibility of Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the high-profile New York firm that also designed the original Newseum exhibits (and also those for the Rose Center). Appelbaum's intense, multilayered approach to exhibitions would seem to be perfectly complementary to Polshek's dynamic atrium design. With any luck, their collaboration will produce sparks, and we'll be the beneficiaries.

The interior architecture as a whole is a marvel. Polshek and colleagues have managed to create a stacked plan that seamlessly unites a great diversity of spaces -- a three-story-high room for the Newseum's fragments of the Berlin Wall, a double-height space for a memorial to journalists killed while at work (an entirely new memorial rather than a transplant of the one in Rosslyn), a small broadcast studio with the real Capitol as a backdrop (rather than the customary photographic reproduction), and many others. All of the spaces are tied together by the great atrium.

There is no telling how Washington's conservative architectural establishment is going to react to Polshek's rather radical design concept. It will face its first tests when it is presented next month to both the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission.

But for all of its contrasting elements, the design does not thumb its nose at its environment. "We are trying to relate to and be respectful of our neighbors," says Polshek.

Among those immediate neighbors, of course, are several of Washington's outstanding buildings. John Russell Pope's National Gallery of Art West Building, the neoclassical temple that sets the elegant, austere tone for the area, is directly across the avenue. With its interlocking triangles, I.M. Pei's East Building is a modern, geometric distillation of Pope's classicism. And Arthur Erickson's Canadian Embassy, the Newseum's next-door neighbor, is a valiant -- and in many ways successful -- attempt to bring Pope and Pei together in a single building.

Using tried and true urban design stratagems such as setbacks and horizontal alignments, Polshek and company honor their honorific position in the city. The topmost level of the first "bar," for instance, continues a line started by Erickson's building immediately to the east. The 95-foot level of the second bar matches both Pope's cornice and another level of Erickson's building. Gestures like these are indeed respectful, and they'll work.

Still, there is no disguising the fact that Polshek is trying to do something vivid and new. Unlike Pei, he does not turn to dramatic geometries, and unlike Erickson he does not try to weave colonnades and other classical devices into his modern building. And unlike any other architect in the area, he uses glass as his basic material rather than stone.

It is an exciting prospect, and Polshek and company have made an awfully good start. True, the avenue facades need some work -- their calculated asymmetries are a bit too busy. The apartment facades are mere minimalist sketches. The corners, particularly at street level, are not all that enticing.

But all buildings at this point in the process need more attention to detail. The basic choices here are sound. Glass is the right material for this institution, and the corner of Sixth and Pennsylvania is the right place for it.




Newseum Makes News at Groundbreaking

© 2002 The Washington Post Company






http://www.polshek.com/mus_news.htm


http://www.newseum.org/newseum/newseum2006/index.htm

[Kris]

The Ripple Effect

An $8 Billion Development Plan Promises Payoffs Far Beyond the High-Water Mark

By Benjamin Forgey
Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, July 12, 2004; Page C01

First in a five-part series


A boat passes under the South Capitol Street Bridge, an eyesore that would be replaced under riverfront reclamation plans.

Washington has two rivers, and one of them the world knows. The other remains a well-kept local secret.

Yet it is the other river, a mere tributary of the broad Potomac, that holds the keys to the city in the first half of the 21st century. The Anacostia's time has come.

Yes, the dirty, slow-moving, undervalued, overburdened, poorly used Anacostia River. Change is coming its way, guided by one of the most ambitious plans in this planned city's 214-year history -- the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative.

The plan is impressive in its territorial reach, complexity and cost.

It takes in both sides of the river's seven-mile wander through the District of Columbia, along with goodly portions of inland terrain.

It requires the coordinated efforts of powerful, turf-conscious agencies in both the city and federal governments, not to mention the enthusiasm and money of dozens of private developers. And ultimately the people of the United States also will have to approve, because the support of Congress is essential.

It will cost, more or less, $8 billion in public investment alone.

Skeptics will say it can't happen, cynics will insist that it won't. But this is what smart cities do these days: Baltimore. Barcelona. Boston.

And that's only the biggest of the B's. To the great benefit of their citizens and economies, cities worldwide have reclaimed waterfronts ruined by pollution, greed, stupidity and neglect.

And it is what Washington needs at this point, for much of the change is going to occur, plan or no plan.

Why? Because the old downtown is practically full. With nowhere else to go, real estate capital is flowing eastward. Vacant or underused private land is abundant near parts of the Anacostia. Living near urban waterfronts is a proven global trend. Residential demand in the city is on the rise.

In a sense, the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative is two things at once. It is a plan to revitalize the actual waterfront, the neglected edges of a neglected river. And it is a vast urban development scheme, a realistic strategy to harness private development for important public goals.

Right now, however, it may be hard to believe strongly in the plan's possibilities because, after four years of talking and writing and talking some more, there have been so few tangible results. This is about to change, says Andrew Altman, director of the city's revamped Office of Planning.

Altman points to dozens of small and large projects that are completed, funded or underway in a mix of public and private development. He predicts that in the next five years these investments will produce 4,637 new residences, 613,000 square feet of retail, 3.2 million square feet of offices and 32 acres of new public parks.

Wow. Those are substantial numbers. And now tune in to Dan Tangherlini, director of the D.C. Department of Transportation. Within five years, he says, there will be the beginnings of a light-rail system. This first stage, he explains, will take over an abandoned railroad right-of-way on the east side of the river, running from the Sousa Bridge south to Bolling Air Force Base, slightly more than 1.5 miles.

Double wow. To anyone who has listened for years to politicians and planners talk about "light rail" -- meaning, basically, tracks that aren't buried or fenced off -- hearing someone predict the appearance of a real train in real time seems wildly rash. And thunderously refreshing.

Taking a careful look at this plan can have the same effect. Spread over 20 to 25 years, it projects a giddy list of benefits.

• An expanded light-rail system connecting the east and west sides of the river all the way from Minnesota Avenue NE to the Southwest waterfront.

• Twenty miles of connected walking, jogging and bike trails along both sides of the river.

• Lots of new places to dock or rent boats or to slip your own craft into the river. More and better rowing facilities. Water taxis, too.

• More than 15,000 new housing units and 20 million square feet of new office development. Thriving new mixed-use neighborhoods east and west of the river.

• A broad urban boulevard at grade, replacing the disgraceful mess that dares to call itself South Capitol Street.

• And bridges. A beautiful new South Capitol Street Bridge with a tunnel to siphon off commuter traffic from the new grand boulevard.

• Two "reconstructed" spans at 11th Street, transforming pedestrian-hostile crossovers into accessible connections to riverside parks.

• Three new pedestrian crossings linking river walks on both sides of the Anacostia.

• And parks. One hundred acres of new parkland, including important riverfront parks at the Southwest waterfront and New Jersey Avenue, Massachusetts Avenue and Poplar Point in Southeast.

• Substantial improvements for much of the 1,700 acres of parkland that currently exist.

• New wetlands added to the already splendid impact of the nature preserves in the river's bucolic northern reaches.

• And, not least, beaches on a river clean enough to swim in.

Of course, the distance from theory to reality is very great, and it is the quality of the results that will count in the long run. But it becomes clear, after due consideration, that this cumbersome-seeming plan represents a thoughtful, hopeful, sophisticated vision for the city's future. It's a guarantee that we'll have at least a decent shot at attaining high-quality results.

Simply put, the river's potential is too great for the city to allow business as usual. The D.C. Council recognized this June 29 with its emphatic 12 to 1 vote approving Mayor Anthony Williams's proposal that a public corporation be set up to oversee the plan's implementation. (A required second vote is scheduled for tomorrow.)

This is good news, indeed. Like the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corp., the federal agency that presided over the renewal of the "nation's Main Street," this District body will have the power to set standards, assemble properties, issue bonds and assist private developers with financial incentives. It'll have, in other words, the tools to oversee a vast, complex, long-term operation.

Plus, it passes what Dick Rigby, co-founder 23 years ago of the Waterfront Center, an independent, Washington-based planning organization, refers to as the "wake-up test." That is, a strong, single-issue agency such as this gives us reasonable assurance "that every day there is somebody who wakes up and whose total focus is the river -- the river is his or her exclusive mission."

Of course, even a powerful local agency can't go it alone. Like almost every important initiative in the capital city, the Anacostia plan desperately needs the cooperation and active support of the federal government.

Fortunately, there is lots of evidence that the feds and the locals are cooperating. City officials have conferred with federal counterparts on a regular basis. Important federal agencies appear to be on board.

In some cases, this coordination already has attained an unusual degree of sophistication. The proposed 20-mile River Walk, for example, will be built largely on National Park Service land by the District's Department of Transportation, mainly with money earmarked by Congress. So far, about $6 million has been appropriated.

Undoubtedly, much of this goodwill is a result of the federal government's own ambitious, enlightened planning exercise. Called "Extending the Legacy: Planning America's Capital for the 21st Century" -- the Legacy plan, for short -- this was initiated by the National Capital Planning Commission and published in 1997.

The two plans are in basic agreement. Both call for new, mixed-use neighborhoods in the city's eastern segments. Both emphasize mass transit and new transportation infrastructure. Both advocate an active, urbane Anacostia waterfront.

The Legacy plan foresees spreading the cultural wealth of memorials and museums beyond Washington's monumental core. The Anacostia planners rightfully embraced this inspired idea in proposals for major parks on both sides of the river at either end of the South Capitol Street Bridge.

The federal plan even advocates things that the local planners didn't dare do: such as "burying divisive freeways" -- namely the one that segregates much of the Southwest and Southeast quadrants from neighborhoods to the north.

And relocating the CSX rail line that currently crosses the Anacostia on a structure that's more like a military barrier than a bridge. Local planners didn't dare because it would've seemed like tilting at windmills -- these are huge endeavors that only the federal government can undertake. And, my, wouldn't it be loverly.

So, the spirit of harmony seems to prevail where it matters most. In working with the city, says NCPC Chairman John Cogbill, "we try to complement each other in everything we do."

But a potentially divisive disagreement exists on how to get things done. The feds, like the locals, want their own agency to call the shots.

In particular, the NCPC has proposed the creation of a South Capitol Street Development Corp. to govern the redevelopment of that key street and its environs. This is understandable, up to a point. After all, like most planning agencies, these two do not have the authority to say "Do it" and expect that anything much will get done.

Still, there ought to be some other way to guarantee federal interests. Two corporations are one too many.

Having two powerful, complementary visions for the city's second river, however, is our good fortune. Together, the local and federal initiatives present a galvanizing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform large, unbeautiful sections of a city widely -- and rightfully -- known for its beauty.

NEXT: The river and its edges


Coming Clean About the Future

With Recreation Central to Plans, Pollution Curbs Can't Be Swept Aside

By Benjamin Forgey
Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, July 13, 2004; Page C01

Second in a five-part series


Near the South Capitol Street Bridge, a heron's repose is marred by trash gathered around an old dock.

Rowers who walk the short, narrow pathway to the Anacostia Community Boathouse, passing by the chain-link compound of the D.C. Street and Alley Cleaning Division, don't even see the sign anymore. But a first-time visitor can't help taking notice.

"WARNING," the sign says. "Combined Sewer Overflow Discharge Point. Pollution May Occur During Rainfalls."

This says a lot about the challenges facing the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative, the city's long-term plan to transform our neglected "other river" into a source of vitality and pride.

On the one hand, the Anacostia's waters at times are a slow-moving cesspool. Regularly, water quality sets off pollution alerts from environmental organizations. The D.C. Health Department warns against swimming in the river or eating its fish.

On the other hand, there is the city's ambition to make the Anacostia "the region's major destination for aquatic recreation." And then there are the intrepid rowers and others -- including ospreys who make their homes on abandoned river pilings -- who refuse to wait for any official plan.

"We've tested the water, and it's not great, but it isn't so bad that creatures can't live here," says John Dillow, an instructor in the Living Classrooms program, which operates out of the Earth Conservation Corps outpost on the river near the South Capitol Street Bridge.

"We're doing the things they say they want to do," says Dylan Cors, president of the four-year-old Anacostia Boathouse Association. "We're bringing people to the water, we're integrating with the neighborhoods with our outreach programs."

It's as if the Anacostia River today is stalled between a disreputable past and a rosy future. You can see much evidence of the one, but it isn't hard to imagine the other.

On the western edge of the river, for instance, just north of the boathouse (at 1115 O St. SE), is a stretch of five marinas for sailboats and motorboats. The area has a no-man's-land look to it, and the marine facilities are hidden and hard to get to.

Yet it wouldn't take much to open up this woebegone quarter, add a few top-flight boating operations and thereby remold it into "boathouse row" -- which is just what the Anacostia plan proposes.

Likewise, it's not so difficult to appreciate the practicality of the plan's vision of public boat landings, canoe tie-ups and boat launches dotting both sides of the river. These would start at Poplar Point on the eastern edge near the South Capitol Street Bridge and continue on to the river's more bucolic northern reaches inside the District, close by the National Arboretum and the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens.

The more you get to thinking this way, the more you realize that the Anacostia already has a lot going for it.

It has those wilderness-like upper reaches with pristine wetlands -- patiently being expanded by the Army Corps of Engineers (in concert with the D.C. Health Department and the National Park Service). Kenilworth Park is nearby, with its ballfields and open green spaces. Kingman Island, created with dredged river mud three-quarters of a century ago, is a quiet retreat alongside restored tidewater marshes.

And then, of course, there is Anacostia Park, stretching more than three miles along the eastern side of the river, with meadows, playing fields, an enclosed public swimming pool, a roller-skating pavilion, a boat launch and some splendid views back to the capital's monuments.

On a sunny weekend day, you'll find basketball players, Frisbee flingers, bicyclists, anglers and nature lovers taking advantage of the athletic facilities and open air. Clearly, these are splendid places, enviable urban resources.

But that isn't to say they are not in great need of improvement. The recreation facilities are worn down or worn out. Maintenance is minimal. Environmental standards for the most part have been abysmal. The monotonous river edge is off-putting. Connections to nearby neighborhoods are few and far between.

Seen in this perspective, the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative is simply a device to channel much-needed, long-overdue benefits.

Admittedly, things get more difficult when you try to envision the great public parks proposed along the western waterfronts at South Capitol Street, New Jersey and Massachusetts avenues SE on the river's western side, and, on the eastern edge, at Poplar Point. The difficulty derives from the fact that, at each of these places, current conditions are uniformly awful.

If you want to see stupendous examples of how not to treat an urban riverside, visit each of these places. Or give it a good try. Not only are they depressing and depopulated, but they also form significant barriers to the riverside. Washington is fortunate to have miles and miles of green, protected waterfront on both of its rivers, but when it came to these particular Anacostia banks, the city turned its back.

Then again, when things are so bad, they just have to get better, don't they? The genius of the city's plan is that it allows us, in these particular places, to look forward to something we don't have except in little bits and pieces: truly urbanized waterfront destinations where lots of people will congregate to enjoy the water however they please.

Ah, the water. The very thought of it brings us back to that warning sign next to the boathouse. It calls attention to the fact that in 21st-century Washington, a third of the city is still making do with a 133-year-old piping system that combines raw sewage with storm water during heavy or long rains. The Anacostia receives the bulk of this messy stuff -- about 3 billion gallons in a typical year.

There have been lawsuits, naturally, and plans to eliminate the problem. In partial response to suits filed by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the Earth Justice Legal Defense Fund and others, the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority has proposed steps to cut overflows by 40 percent within five years, at a cost of about $180 million.

But the pace seems definitively poky. A longer-term plan aims to cut the number of annual "CSO events" (the initials stand for "combined sewer overflow"), when sewage mixes with storm water, from an average of 80 to two. Yet the starting and ending dates of this elaborate project, involving the construction of underground water storage tunnels, have not been settled. Neither has the matter of who will pay the more than $1 billion bill. (The feds certainly ought to ante up their fair share.)

The District's sewage overflows, however, are only one of the Anacostia's problems. The river also suffers from Maryland's sewage. Because 83 percent of its 174-square-mile watershed lies in Prince George's and Montgomery counties, this can be quite a problem. There are no official CSO outfalls in either of the two counties, but sewage definitely is escaping somehow, through broken pipes or illegal hookups or whatever.

And lots of it. Fecal coliform bacteria counts taken by the Anacostia Watershed Society often show higher amounts at the Bladensburg measuring point than anywhere in the District. So it's clear that when it comes to depositing sewage in the wrong places, both the District and Maryland have to clean up their acts.

Nor is sewage necessarily the river's biggest pollution problem. More than 70,000 tons of sediment, trash and toxics are dumped into the river every year, according to Thomas Arrasmith, the volunteer chairman of the Anacostia Watershed Citizens Advisory Committee. The main culprit here is storm water runoff -- the noisome stuff that comes when rain falls on roads and parking lots and all the other impervious surfaces we build, covering over the natural systems that normally would absorb and filter water on its way to the river. All of these pollution problems are exacerbated by the river's heavy sedimentation and its slow-moving waters.

Big plans to do something about runoff preceded the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative. An Anacostia Watershed Restoration Agreement was entered into in 1987 by all of the major jurisdictions and government agencies with some control over the rivers. There have been other collaborative enterprises, such as the Anacostia Watershed Toxics Alliance, also made up of federal, state and local agencies.

But these agreements do not contain any binding cleanup dates, and in consequence, the pace of improvement has been oh-so-gradual. Things are bound to continue that way if the effort to clean up the river isn't given a huge public boost. So far, disappointingly, the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative has not provided that jolt.

Yes, there is plenty of talk and there are volumes of written words. The plan's text exposes the need in great detail and proposes a thorough set of solutions.

Certainly, new development on the river should follow a fresh pattern, often called low-impact development, whereby buildings are sited and constructed with nature -- and the river -- in mind.

Clearly, the effort to uncover the Anacostia's long-buried tributaries, already begun at Watts Branch in Northeast Washington, will pay environmental and aesthetic dividends.

Demonstrably, many sections of that lovely 20-mile river walk can be combined with new, more ecologically sensitive, visually pleasing ways of treating the river's edge, replacing the old concrete or stone revetment with a kinder planted contour.

All of these proposals, and many more, should be eagerly pursued. It is vigor, however, that seems lacking. There is no sense of urgency about the fundamental substance that makes a river a river. We can wait around, the plan says, until 2025 to have Anacostia water we can safely swim in.

Yet what this complex plan lacks, above all, is a central focus, a sort of banner headline, to grip the public imagination. Water quality should be that focus.

"They ought to commit to a dramatic effort to improve the river by 2010, to make it clean, make it into a place you can paddle on with your child without fear for your health," says Arrasmith. "That would be something exciting, something all can buy into."

This seems right: Clean the water and the money, and people, will follow.

NEXT: Redoing the Southwest waterfront


A Vision for the Southwest

New Homes, Parks, Cultural Facilities Among Changes Planned

By Benjamin Forgey
Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, July 14, 2004; Page C01

Third in a five-part series


The wharf on the Southwest waterfront is a big attraction for fish shoppers. The renewal plan aims to make the fish market the jewel that it ought to be.

The Southwest waterfront is one of the few places in Washington where the city busily engages the water's edge.

A place where people live. An active, interesting place that people walk to from nearby streets, mingling with fish sellers, fishermen, folks hanging out at waterside restaurants and bars, families out for an evening stroll.

Oops. Time warp. That reality was eons ago. Back before much of the neighborhood was bulldozed in the 1960s to make way for something new.

And, believe it or not, that lively image was how it was supposed to be once again -- only cleaner and brighter when the bulldozing was done. Despite the fine intentions, however, the urban renewers got it wrong, and the waterfront became the place we know and, for so many, find impossible to love today.

A failed place where the fish sellers hang on at the edge and where people parade from cars and buses directly to and from eateries and tourist boats. Where, most days, nobody really hangs out just for the pleasure of it.

Now, the day has arrived, again, to brace for dramatic change, because the Southwest waterfront is a prime focus of the city's Anacostia Waterfront Initiative.

"The Southwest waterfront," says Andrew Altman, director of the city's Office of Planning, "is absolutely at the pivotal location between the water, the Mall, the downtown and the Southwest neighborhood. It should be the premier destination waterfront in Washington. It should be a great urban waterfront."

Chances for change are good. Despite its faults, the setting, extending nearly a mile along the Washington Channel, is all-around great. It's got water and boats, and it's a five-minute walk from the Jefferson Memorial. Ten minutes from the Mall. It is perfectly placed to supply the demand for in-city residences. And the city already controls much of the land.

And chances are strong that when it comes, the change will look pretty much like this: An orderly row of mid-rise buildings for residences, hotel rooms, small offices, stores and cultural facilities will replace the low buildings now facing the channel. The new buildings will accommodate up to 800 upscale housing units (with 20 percent "affordable") and a hotel with up to 450 rooms. It'll be a high-density urban neighborhood.

The waterside esplanade will be redesigned to be active and alluring. The 10th Street Overlook, now the site of a modest memorial to Benjamin Banneker, will be rebuilt to connect directly to the waterfront. Stores and restaurants will be greatly increased in number.

Existing parks will be significantly improved, and two new ones will be added -- a Market Square at the northwestern end of the promenade, next to the existing fish market, and a civic park at the southeastern end. The civic park, with space for an as yet undesignated cultural facility, would greatly enhance the setting for Arena Stage, which has its own plans for an exciting makeover.

For today's residents of nearby apartment buildings and townhouses, the changes should be, on balance, a big plus -- though anyone fond of the sleepy atmosphere may well resent the new busyness that change will bring.

Ironically, this bold restructuring was made possible by one of the biggest of the mistakes made by the urban renewers decades ago. They thought the main idea was to make sure there was plenty of room for cars. Thus, they laid out two parallel streets -- wide Maine Avenue and wide Water Street, with parking lots in between.

To be sure, the plan does work for cars. Access to and from the freeway and the 14th Street bridges is a snap and, except at the fish market, parking is always easy to find. It's as if the planners actually wanted to keep nearby residents away from the waterside or, more likely, expected them to use their cars to get there.

All in all, the 1960s waterfront layout, a key part of the Southwest Urban Renewal Plan, amounted to a catalogue of errors that have long needed correcting.

Those long, low buildings placed in a row along the waterfront act more as barriers than allurements.

The architecture is banal, at best, from the early Pizza Hut profile of the Capital Yacht Club in the north to the dull motel modernism of the Channel Inn in the south. Paint jobs and quick fixes of the other buildings have done little to improve their warehouselike exteriors.

The public spaces are equally nondescript. Hard-surfaced, with mere dollops of shade and a few well-intentioned nautical implements (anchors, ship's bells and the like) for local color, the rectangular parks between the buildings are, not surprisingly, unpopulated most of the time.

Sadder still is the waterfront esplanade. Intended as a grand public promenade, it turned out to be a forbidding, narrow walkway.

On the waterside, fences with locked gates separate walkers from the water and the boating piers of the channel marinas. On the land side, a concrete wall closes off access to the restaurants. A row of waterside trees is but a sorry reminder of good intentions gone amiss.

The overarching error, of course, was the failure to put people back in residences at the center of the waterfront. Post-World War II planners believed strongly that cities would be greatly improved if people were to live, work and play in zones that are separate and distinct. The Southwest waterfront is a testament to that idea.

By contrast, the city's waterfront initiative pursues an opposite, older urban ideal of mixed-used, interconnected neighborhoods. How well it fulfills these noble intentions remains to be seen, but the ideas are fundamentally sound.

"Yesteryear's mistake is today's opportunity" would be a good motto for the plan. All that "wasted" space, as Altman rightly calls the redundant roads and surface parking, can be adapted for useful purposes -- namely to put up buildings people can live in and to shape new spaces for them to play in.

As a result, not only will the new Southwest waterfront provide lots of homes where there are none, it'll also dramatically increase space for public parks, almost tripling the area from five to 14 acres.

At the same time, it'll significantly reduce surfaces covered by paving from 42 percent of the total area to about 20 percent. Not incidentally, there will be a lot more parking than now exists, but most of it will be underneath new buildings.

Footprints for the proposed new buildings show the structures distributed in a way that preserves "view corridors" at Ninth, Seventh and M streets SW, an important way to link the surrounding neighborhood to the water.

Massing studies show buildings with varied profiles, averaging from six to nine stories high with towers up to 12 stories, a useful concept in a height-limited city with its mainly uniform profile. Retail, as it should be, is concentrated at ground-floor level.

All of these preliminary studies will be heartening to the architects who end up designing the buildings, for the studies encourage the notion that something truly excellent can and should happen here. Altman has made this ambition explicit: "We'd like to see interesting, innovative modern architecture that'll be an attraction in and of itself," he says.

Likewise, design studies of the esplanade show a sophisticated grasp of what went wrong and how to correct it.

Today, the waterside walkway is divided into two 20-foot-wide paved paths separated by a five-foot-high concrete wall and intermittent stairwells. The plan proposes to widen the overall width to 60 feet to accommodate walkers, joggers, bicyclists and outdoor restaurant seating. It also provides two options to improve connections between the two segments, both employing gentle, stepped transitions.

As for direct public access to the water, practically nonexistent today, the plan proposes to construct new public piers at Seventh, Ninth and M streets, where folks can fish, launch small boats or simply relax. Cafes or other small eating facilities might be placed on one or all of the piers.

The M Street Pier, labeled as "grand" in the plan, would be an extension of the splendid new Civic Park, and would be one more reason for neighbors and people from all over the region to make the Southwest waterfront a destination.

At this point, of course, a lot remains uncertain. By far the biggest challenge to the plan is the possible location of a major league ballpark on the 10th Street Overlook site and atop the Southeast Freeway -- a sci-fi idea in the wrong location.

If Washington does get its long-deserved team, it definitely ought to find a home elsewhere in the city. The overlook location comes with all sorts of problems.

Aesthetically, it would rival the Capitol on the Washington skyline and would tower over the new waterfront, reducing it to being a mere foreground for a large, unpleasant wall. Functionally, the baseball crowds (and their cars) would upset the plan's delicate balance between urban neighborhood and tourist attraction.

The Anacostia Waterfront Initiative's proposed treatment of the 10th Street Overlook is far superior to the behemoth baseball park idea. For one thing, it keeps the overlook open, as an overlook, and thus in visual and psychological touch with the Mall and downtown.

And the proposed "grand civic staircase," cascading down the hill like the Spanish Steps in Rome, is a simple, potentially elegant solution to a long-standing problem.

On the other hand, the idea of a Visitor and Transportation Center -- a parking lot for cars and tourist buses buried under the overlook -- deserves more study. Actually, questions abound up and down this one-mile waterfront line.

Will the fish market improve enough to become the regional jewel that it ought to be?

Is sufficient attention being paid to the important pedestrian connection between the waterfront and the Jefferson Memorial, now a dangerous little sidewalk under a narrow bridge?

Is moving the cruise ship platforms north to the new Market Square really a smart idea?

Will the new Maine Avenue make a vital contribution, with the same old suburbanesque potpourri of office buildings on its eastern edge?

The truth is, anyone who looks carefully at the details of the new Southwest Waterfront Plan can come up with his own list of questions. But the plan is big enough to absorb any necessary changes. In large measure it is doable, and ought to be done.

NEXT: The Near Southeast


Betting Big on Near Southeast

City Planners See Great Promise in a Long-Neglected Neighborhood

By Benjamin Forgey
Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, July 15, 2004; Page C01

Fourth in a five-part series


Construction has begun on a new headquarters for the Department of Transportation, which will bring the Near Southeast much-needed jobs.

Optimists have said it for decades: The time is coming soon for the Near Southeast. But then, year after year, nothing happened.

Today, however, there is reason to believe. Although it's still pretty much a desolate checkerboard of working warehouses and vacant lots, this important, up-for-grabs segment of the city is changing fast.

For that reason, this large chunk of territory between the Southeast Freeway and the banks of the Anacostia River is a prime focus of the city's ambitious Anacostia Waterfront Initiative.

In a sense, the plan for this district is not about its mostly forgotten waterfront. It is, rather, about urban regeneration, about reviving a river's edge to attract, coordinate and control public and private investment.

Taking in 378 acres, the plan is the biggest urban renewal effort in Washington in more than 30 years, comparable to the gigantic federal plan that reconfigured Southwest Washington from the 1950s through the 1970s.

Actually, if you add nearby Buzzard Point and the western edge of South Capitol Street to the total -- territories technically excluded from the plan but crucial to it -- the Near Southeast effort is the largest in the city's history.

A brief rundown of what planners foresee in the next two decades:

• The area's residential population will increase from 1,850 today to more than 11,000.

• Employment in the district will rise from about 19,000 today, concentrated in or close by the Washington Navy Yard, to more than 96,000.

• Space occupied by retailers and restaurants will go up dramatically, from less than 50,000 square feet to approximately 750,000 square feet, much of it spread throughout the area in mandated ground-floor retail stores.

Fueling these optimistic predictions has been the recent transformation of the 205-year-old Navy Yard from post-World War II backwater to bustling command center. With dozens of new or retrofitted buildings, the yard now hosts a daily workforce of more than 11,000.

Businesses with close ties to the Navy have followed. In the last three years, five large -- if architecturally undistinguished -- office buildings have appeared on once-desolate M Street SE.

Furthermore, after four disappointing decades, the long-planned Southeast Federal Center on former Navy Yard land finally seems ready to come out of the ground. Excavation has begun for a new headquarters of the federal Department of Transportation, a 1.35 million-square-foot, Michael Graves-designed behemoth facing M Street between Second and Fourth streets SE.

And plans are being readied for the "center's" remaining 42 acres. Fortunately, these new plans will be nothing like the old ones in procedure or product.

In principle, a federal employment center on government-owned land in the Near Southeast always made plenty of sense. The area, after all, is close to Capitol Hill, adjacent to major highways and on top of a Green Line Metro station.

But in practice, there was always plenty of resistance from federal employees because the area was an urban wasteland. Nobody wanted to work there. And the idea for a single-use office compound wasn't compelling.

Then, thanks in no small measure to D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and the Southeast Federal Center Public-Private Development Act that she sponsored in 2000, the rules changed to encourage a coordinated approach to redevelopment. The General Services Administration, the government landlord, is negotiating with a private developer on a final plan.

And, thanks also to the city's waterfront plan and the 1997 federal Legacy plan for the nation's capital, the new vision for the Southeast Federal Center calls for a mix of uses. There will be room for about 6,000 federal employees and 6,000 residents on the site.

Another major project in advanced stages of planning is the transformation of the Arthur Capper public housing complex. This is a Hope VI program sponsored by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, in which "severely distressed" public housing units are repaired or rebuilt as part of a mixed-income neighborhood.

The total number of units here will more than double, from 707 to about 1,700. Existing public housing units will be replaced in kind and a portion of the added residences will be subsidized.

Nearby, a consortium of private owners will erect mid-rise residential towers around Canal Blocks Park. As a result of a city deal with developers, this major public amenity, taking up three long, narrow blocks, will be financed largely with private money. (The D.C. government's Office of Planning recently received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to conduct a design competition for the park.)

Clearly, then, plans for the new Near Southeast are every bit as ambitious as the old Southwest urban renewal program. But there are huge differences. Because the terrain is so sparsely populated, the Near Southeast plan, unlike the Southwest effort, will not require massive residential demolition and population displacement. In other words, it isn't another "urban removal" scheme.

And in ironic contrast to the old, brave-new-world modernist plan, the city's new, revisionist idea enthusiastically looks backward. Its aim, that is, is to fill all those empty Southeast lots with something resembling a densely populated, traditional urban neighborhood.

To accomplish all this largely with private money, the public sector must spend its own precious dollars in exactly the right places. This explains the Anacostia initiative's strong emphasis on improving transportation infrastructure.

A new South Capitol Street bridge, for instance, is a must -- and not only because the existing Frederick Douglass Bridge is in need of significant repair. The Douglass Bridge, designed exclusively to whisk commuters in cars from one point to another, treats the river (not to mention pedestrians and bicyclists) with extraordinary rudeness.

Plus, it's nothing much to look at. A new span, presumably, would both look and perform a lot better.

A new South Capitol Street is also a must. As it stands, the so-called street is really just an extension of the highway for the cars coming over the bridge. It is ugly, it is an insult to the edifice for which it is named, it is a formidable elevated barrier between neighborhoods and a major impediment to healthy development.

Not surprisingly, both the city and the federal plans call for the street to be rebuilt as a handsome, ground-level urban boulevard. The city's plan advocates digging a tunnel under the new bridge to alleviate commuter traffic. Even more radically, the federal plan foresees the tunnelization of the entire Southeast Freeway, thus eliminating a massive barrier between Capitol Hill neighborhoods and the Near Southeast.

In addition to these huge, long-term infrastructure improvements, the Anacostia initiative, as it must, focuses much attention on projects that can be built in increments -- extending a street here, providing new sidewalks there, or building the river walk segment by segment.

Connections between neighborhoods and access to the river's edge are key elements of the city's plan. In the Near Southeast, this means reestablishing an urban street system that has been erased over the years.

The construction of South Capitol Street and its bridge, for instance, cut off most of the direct east-west connections between the two sides of the street. The plan proposes to rebuild these crosstown streets and to transform beleaguered M Street into a "pedestrian friendly urban boulevard."

North-south connections play an even larger role. Today the Near Southeast suffers from a double whammy -- while it is almost impossible to get to the waterfront, once you reach it there isn't much to admire. The Anacostia plan proposes to alter both conditions, the first by pushing through streets and avenues that have long been shut off, and the second by making the riverfront a place one would like to be.

Both of these moves, like practically everything in the plan, require careful coordination among the many players with a stake in the outcome.

For its new headquarters the federal Department of Transportation, for example, initially wanted a single building extending more than 700 feet along M Street SE -- the equivalent of an enormous wall. Washington's urban planners, on the other hand, badly wanted Third Street to pass through the site, and for good reason: The street is an important opening to the river.

Time was when the outcome would hardly have been in doubt: The feds arrogantly would have done what they wanted on federal property. But this time around, city officials came armed with a compelling plan that had to be taken seriously, and a compromise was reached. An extension of Third Street will be built through the site, but it will be closed to cars for security reasons indefinitely.

In olden days, lots of things would have been different. For instance, the Navy most likely would have said a simple no to a public river walk coursing through the military reservation.

Today, however, even with heightened security concerns, Navy Yard officials welcome outsiders to its museums and riverside walk. They've even expressed a willingness to rebuild the yard's waterside esplanade to better accommodate the city's river walk needs.

That's quite a turnaround, one of hundreds that will have to occur if the city's bold plans for a new Near Southeast are to bear fruit.

NEXT: The Other Side


Popularizing Poplar Point

Plans Would Make Anacostia's Neglected Parkland Accessible

By Benjamin Forgey
Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, July 16, 2004; Page C01

Last in a five-part series


The eastern bank of the Anacostia is mostly federally owned parkland.

Poplar Point. Ask any taxi driver to take you there, ask any longtime Washington resident where it is, ask almost anybody. Chances are good, you'll draw a blank.

This is because Poplar Point, a prominent bend in the eastern shoreline of the Anacostia River, has been treated for decades as if it were invisible.

Technically, it is public parkland, but much of the territory is fenced off. Much of the land is polluted. Traffic roars by on Interstate 295. The Frederick Douglass Bridge soars overhead. It's drive-by terrain.

Yet this particular piece of ill-used riverside, with nearly a mile of unimpeded access to the water and spectacular views of the Capitol and downtown, could be one of the most pleasant places in the entire city.

And will be, say the authors of the city's Anacostia Waterfront Initiative.

This bend in the river will become, they predict, "a showcase of ecological restoration, culture, history and community," and also "a catalyst for neighborhood economic development."

Transforming Poplar Point is but the most dramatic action proposed by the city's wide-ranging plan for the areas east of the river. The whole plan is predicated on the idea of mitigating perceived and actual inequalities between the west and east sides of the Anacostia.

Two unavoidable facts conditioned the plan's approach to the eastern side. One is that the eastern edge of the river is predominantly parkland owned by the federal government.

This long strip of federal parkland is both a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand, it saved the riverfront from the industrial depredations familiar in other cities. On the other hand, it prevented the growth of lively waterfront communities.

This is why, with the exception of Poplar Point, all of the intensive urban development anticipated by the plan will take place on the western side of the river, as we have seen.

To overcome this imbalance, the plan's chief tactic is to use west-side growth to help finance east-side improvements, such as "housing, commercial revitalization, public parks and community facilities."

"The basic idea is that a portion of the revenue generated on the waterfront should stay on the waterfront," says Andrew Altman, director of the city's Office of Planning. "That way, we're always reinvesting in the neighborhoods and vitality of the waterfront."

Great idea. Altman is understandably fond of pointing out that the building of Battery Park City in the 1980s generated 20,000 units of affordable housing in other areas of New York City.

But follow-through down here in Washington is absolutely key. If the east side does not see significant benefits, then the plan will have failed its chief ethical test.

The other inescapable east-side condition is Interstate 295, otherwise known as the Anacostia Freeway.

Like many other urban highways of the 1950s and 1960s, this one was built with a single goal in mind: Move the commuters. Consequently, no heed was paid to the fact that the road created an insurmountable wall between the river and all those communities in the Anacostia hills.

Longtime residents such as Arrington Dixon remember what it was like before the highway: "We'd just walk on over, family and friends, spread a blanket and eat soft-shell crabs."

After the highway, though, approaching the park became an inconvenient, unwelcoming experience. Today, you have to seek out a limited number of narrow, unlovely underpasses.

"You've got the space, you've got the air, you've got the water," says Dixon of the east side, "but unfortunately you've got the highway, too."

The Anacostia Waterfront Initiative does not promise a return to the good old days before the road. That would require the tunneling of the highway, a vastly expensive and technically challenging endeavor.

"Ultimately, we settled with living with the fact that this thing was going to be there," says Uwe Brandes of the Office of Planning. Instead, Brandes says, the idea is to "radically transform its image and design."

This means, basically, to reconfigure the road's entrances and exits, thereby reducing negative impact on the community, and also to make the road more "parkway-like," with improved plantings and the like. Though welcome, such changes will not alter the fact that, to the people living in Anacostia, the highway will remain a formidable (if somewhat better-looking) barrier.

To improve accessibility to the waterfront, the plan proposes a series of six "gateways" -- at Howard Road SE, Good Hope Road SE, Pennsylvania Avenue SE, Massachusetts Avenue SE, Benning Road NE and Nannie Helen Burroughs Avenue NE. A pedestrian bridge at W Street SE, in the heart of the historic Anacostia business district, also is proposed.

"Gateways" is a fancy way of characterizing what amount to relatively minor alterations in existing conditions.

The reconfigured interchange at Pennsylvania Avenue, however, is an exception. There, the proposal is to burrow the freeway under the avenue, reversing the current arrangement.

This is a significant change, opening a vista to the Capitol and greatly improving opportunities for the commercial center there.

Otherwise, there's nothing dramatically new about the "new" entry points. The freeway underpasses at Burroughs, Howard and Good Hope, for example, will be given new sidewalks, lighting and, possibly, a public artwork or two.

Hmmm. Not terribly impressive. The plan's approach to this intrusive highway seems altogether too timid.

Planners hope, however, that conditions at each of the nearby commercial clusters will improve significantly. Altman points out that these "mini town centers" are where some of the west side reinvestment likely would be spent. Dan Tangherlini, director of the city's transportation system, has made the construction of a light-rail line on the east side a high priority.

Another way to make the plan benefit the east side neighborhoods -- and the rest of the city and region, too -- is to make sure that long stretch of riverside parkland is worth getting to. Or, let's make that more worth the effort.

The parks as they are today aren't terrible, but they definitely will profit from changes such as a greatly improved river walk, new and improved athletic fields, "daylighting" of hidden streams, and restored wetlands. And a new, world-class aquatic center, first proposed during the city's Olympics bid, clearly would invite year-round attention.

On the green eastern edges of the river there is, however, one place where intensive urban development is both desirable and possible: Poplar Point.

The future of the point, says the plan, is a two-step matter. The first phase is to construct a great civic park. Fences will go down. Large patches of deeply polluted soil will be cleaned up. Temporary National Park Service buildings -- despite their very permanent look -- will disappear in favor of meadows and ball fields.

Invisible Stickfoot Creek, by contrast, will magically reappear and feed a splendid new marsh. A civic space will be shaped at the rounded point itself, suitable for large gatherings and smaller performances. There will be plenty of room for a national monument, perhaps celebrating Frederick Douglass or some other worthy facet of local and national history.

This new Poplar Point park will serve as an orienting place for all of the east side waterfront parks. You'll be able to park your car nearby when you stop in at the new visitors' center, and then drive along an elegant, crescent-shaped boulevard. Or, conversely, you'll arrive at the Anacostia Metro station and take a pleasant walk to the riverside. You can stop to rent a bike. Or a boat.

Eventually, you'll be able to live there, too. This is step two. Though all of Poplar Point is federally owned, there are chunks and slivers of privately owned land along Howard Road, and additional parcels of District-controlled land under the present-day South Capitol Street Bridge. Using the remade riverfront as a lure, planners hope to persuade private developers to go to work on these tracts of land.

Linked both to the water to its west and the historic Anacostia community to its east, this is envisioned as a lively, distinctive, mixed-use urban neighborhood, similar to the ones intended for the river's western shores. There is even enough room, around the immense Metro parking garage, to build a little circle of museums. The idea is to make this the east side version of the plan's west side theme: making places where the city meets the river.

Much of the step-two vision, however, is dependent on something else happening first -- namely, the construction of a new South Capitol Street Bridge over the Anacostia and a new commuter traffic tunnel under the river.

Bluntly put, the neighborhood won't get built until the bridge is done. However, in a perverse sort of way, there's a bright side to this inevitable pause between vision and reality. It'll give planners, or somebody, time to improve upon a far-from-perfect plan for the new neighborhood.

In particular, they have to figure out a much better way to connect the new community to historic Anacostia. That Howard Road underpass doesn't cut it. Neither does the half-hearted redesign of the current Metro station, a no-man's land that is, in itself, something of a barrier.

The stakes are high. If this part of the plan is not improved significantly, the "vibrant" neighborhood will turn out to be nothing more than an enclave that's isolated physically, economically and psychologically from the rest of Anacostia.

But, as I said, there's time. It'll be a decade, at minimum, before we see that new bridge. Meanwhile, the city needs to get on with the job of transforming the park at Poplar Point into the civic asset that it can be, and that two visionary plans say it should become.

Two plans, let's not forget. We're lucky to have two. First came the federal government's 1997 Legacy plan, with helpful ideas about transforming Washington's other river. And now, the city's own complex, comprehensive plan for the Anacostia and its environs, four years in the making, is on the cusp of action.

Change is upon us, and change can be chaotic and scary. Still, as the authors of these plans also knew, change is what makes great cities. Trying to control change, as these plans nobly attempt to do, is a chancy business. But the prospect is exhilarating.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company


www.anacostiawaterfront.net

[tmg]

Covering a Lot of Ground in a Little Space

By Adrian Higgins
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 20, 2004; Page C01

The building that is the National Museum of the American Indian is refreshingly shocking for button-down Washington, suggesting some Western butte in its honeyed and chiseled Kasota limestone. But over its five years of construction, we have had time to get used to it. Wait till you see the landscape around it.

In what must be the most ambitious and freighted exterior environment of any Smithsonian museum, the outdoor spaces work hard to capture both abstract and literal interpretations of the Chesapeake region before European settlement. On the museum's east side, viewers may be amazed to find a swampy backwater that appears to seep from the U.S. Capitol. The District of pre-Columbia?

Bringing rude nature to the hallowed ground of the Mall takes guts, of course. But this is not rude nature. No wilderness actually looked like this. It is as calculated a built artifact in its own way as is Tomorrowland. It is nature to which human intelligence and imagination have been applied. It is an Indian's image of Eden.

Yet this re-created sacred wilderness in a rectilinear city provides an incongruity of environment that may in its odd way close the gulf that still exists between Native Americans and the mainstream culture, says the museum's director, W. Richard West Jr.

"What people know about native people is either nothing or something very thin," he says in an interview, "and full of stereotypes and misapprehensions about what native people were, and are."

If the 98 percent of the museum's visitors who are not from the native culture come to see the landscape through the eyes of the Indian, he says, it will foster mutual understanding and respect, a vital step in bringing together "two peoples who have sat in a rather unreconciled place."

Twelve years in design and construction, the landscape consists of four environments -- wetlands, an upland hardwood forest, meadowlands and traditional crops. These are meant to recall vast and different ecosystems, an entire Native American paradise shoehorned into a city block off Independence Avenue. The meadow and, to a lesser degree, the crops look feeble, a product of their recent installation late in the growing season. Indeed, this evocation of a thriving, presumably Algonquian plantation and habitat looks desperately forlorn in its infancy. In future years, it is hoped, these features will be robust, though this south side of the museum near Independence Avenue will be bare in winter.

On the north side, the woodland is crammed with trees, shrubs, perennials and wildflowers, many clearly unhappy and stressed (they were supposed to be planted in April but had to wait until August because of construction delays). But this thicket does, and will, replicate the native flora of the Piedmont and should grow into an ever thicker veil against Jefferson Drive.

For the opening, the wetlands are the most convincing habitat, framing a vignette of something wild but serene. Both the scale of the 30,000-gallon pond and its planted embankments, rising to six feet, seem perfectly natural.

The constructed ecologies and sheer number of plants -- more than 30,000 -- will require an unusually high level of gardening maintenance and may change dramatically with time. "At what point do you keep the violets in their proper place in respect to the bloodroot?" said Marsha Lea, one of the museum's landscape architects with EDAW Inc. of Alexandria. "It's not something the Smithsonian has had to do before."

Amid all this flora, the design team has gone to town on the hardscape, most of which is black granite in relief from the brilliant limestone building. A waterfall spills from the northwest corner of the museum (where most visitors will arrive) and then forms an abstract river winding to the east entrance, whose floor marks the alignment of the planets on the day the law to approve the $219 million museum was signed by President George H.W. Bush in 1989.

There are dozens of large boulders, called grandfather rocks, like everything here carefully chosen by a design team headed by Native Americans. These dark granite stones may be imbued with great spirit, but they are all pretty much the same size and shape from an aesthetic standpoint at least, and rendered duller for it.

Another area offers a quiet enclave for prayerful rituals. Between the river and the building is a sunken amphitheater and next to it an earthen hearth for cooking ceremonies and demonstrations. "You can imagine the permitting -- a fire on the Mall next to a building," said Roger Courtenay, also of EDAW. The firm gave form to a natural world envisioned by the museum's ethnobotanist, Donna House.

House grew up on a Navajo reservation in Arizona, and in the years she has spent in preparation for Tuesday's opening of the museum, she canoed tributaries of the Potomac River for a feel for the eastern countryside.

A total of 1,440 native white lilies carpet the water, their discuslike leaves contrasting with the upright shapes of the reeds and grasses. The banks are clothed in blueberries, buttonbush and dozens of other plantings amid the trees. A dead baldcypress lies on its side, signaling the circle of life.

The irony of the wetlands, of course, is that this part of the Mall was a swamp before it was reclaimed. Tiber Creek once flowed close to this area and now flows under it, buried in a great culvert that traverses the museum's southwest corner.

Restoring this nature may seem hilariously artificial or worse, since the Indian reverence for the natural world is based on its permanence. But "land has memory," said House, surveying the wetlands. She hopes for "visitors besides the five-fingered people: dragonflies, damselflies, hawks, ducks."

Early on, horticulturalists and designers rejected plans to present southwestern and other scenes: Not only because it would have been hard to keep the plants alive but also because the setting would have seemed false, a reach fully into the realm of Disney.

West says the chosen landscape is, like the museum, "honest and truthful" even in its artifice, and provides the context to learn and celebrate Indian life.

Even in its unfulfilled state, the croplands section does demonstrate one of the great ingenuities of Indian agriculture -- the Three Sisters interplanting of corn, beans and squash. The cornstalk provides a pole for the vining bean, which, as a legume, feeds its host with nitrogen. The low, broad leaves of the squash form a living mulch for the two others, shading their roots, keeping weeds at bay and preserving the soil's precious moisture.

The museum honors native peoples of the entire hemisphere: Andean cultures gave the world the potato and the tomato, and tobacco is celebrated, too.

These are all useful props for talking about the native culture, past and present, but whether the landscape can be a vehicle for something more than a grade school field trip experience, and the deeper connection to Indian existence that West wants, remains to be seen.

You cannot fully explain the Indian landscape without delving into the essential spiritual life of the Native American. Though there is no one indigenous religion, and the various tribes have different rituals, taboos and origin myths, there is a common belief that the person is but part of a whole living universe of beings that must be acknowledged and respected, from the harvested corn to the wind that shapes the living rocks to the rainbows that bless the precious spring rains.

And yet the same sensibilities may prevent that comprehension. Just as every inch of the landscape might figure in a thousand stories of Indian life, you may have to strain to hear them. For one thing, you will be hard-pressed to find any labels or signs in and around the natural habitat because tagging an object perceived as sentient is considered rude, akin to literally labeling a person. (Though we have come to that as an ID-obsessed society.) Museum spokesman Thomas Sweeney said public tours of the landscape will start next spring. But if you aren't on the tour, you may never know that there are four cardinal point stones, one on each side of the museum, and that the northern one is from the Yellowknife area of Canada and is 4 billion years old, or that the one facing west is a ball of basalt that bubbled up out of a Hawaiian volcano a mere 200 years ago.

House believes that the obviously un-Mall-like environment of the museum will immediately telegraph to visitors that this is a native place. In a country where many people cannot distinguish between a goose and a duck or a wasp and a bee, however, that may be wishful thinking.

And if the museum is successful in conveying an Indian worldview, will that help bring native and nonnative people together?

Holly Shimizu, director of the adjoining U.S. Botanic Garden, recounted a tour she gave of herbal plants. "I go through this garden pinching and cutting and sniffing, and there was a Native American woman and she got upset with me because she felt I was disrespecting the plants." Shimizu, as a lifelong devotee of herbal plants, in turn took umbrage. And yet, she feels the drag of the Western system of "learning things in boxes as if they are not connected" and is intrigued by the idea that plants have spirit and power.

Courtenay, the landscape architect, said he now "thinks about things in the landscape in a lot different way." The Indian ethic "seeps into your understanding of how you put the world together. It's not just about individual plants, it's the habitat you're creating." That spiritual connection "is not completely not present in how Westerners look at plants, but my impression is that Native Americans have a more holistic feeling that's more genuine and deep."

Others have been inspired, too. Nancy Bechtol, who heads the Smithsonian's horticultural services division and who is hiring two full-time horticulturists to maintain what will be a very demanding and changing garden, recalls an early meeting. The call was for some very tall trees in the wetlands that might lure a bald eagle from the Potomac River a few miles south. "I'm thinking to myself, okay, it will be a postage stamp in comparison to a real habitat, but they're serious."

This year, as if in homage to the new Indian museum, foxes have been roaming the Mall. Bechtol saw one saunter across the Enid Haupt garden behind the Smithsonian Castle. Maybe House "is not that far off," said Bechtol. "Maybe the eagle will come. We'll find out."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

[tmg]

Natural Wonder
Douglas Cardinal's Rough-Hewn Mountain Of a Building Channels The Spirit of the Earth

By Benjamin Forgey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 17, 2004; Page C01

Okay, the time at last has come to ask the big architectural questions about the National Museum of the American Indian, opening on Tuesday.

Basically, they are three: Is the architecture any good? Does the building fit the Mall? And who did the design?

If this last question strikes you as odd, you can rest assured -- it is odd. However, let's take the questions in order.

It is pleasing to report that the architecture is very good, and quite strange. The building rises above the elm trees of the Mall like a monumental apparition. Its curving walls shout, "Look at me!" And the more you do, the more there is to see and think about.

Even more satisfying is the conclusion that, physically and philosophically, the new building creates a strong, tension-filled dialogue with its setting, and carries it off with amazing grace.

But whom to credit for this good work? That's another question entirely. Uncertainty as to authorship of the whole and its parts -- especially the parts -- is one of the haunting curiosities of this building.

We know that Douglas Cardinal, the Indian architect from Canada well respected for his signature "organic" works, is the creative intellect behind the building.

Yet Cardinal and his U.S. collaborators were fired by the Smithsonian Institution in 1998, about halfway through the design process. It is thus hard to tell exactly who is responsible for what, especially on the inside. The reasons for this make a sad, messy story.

Fortunately, back in 1999 the Commission of Fine Arts stepped in to block ruinous design changes proposed by the Smithsonian after Cardinal's dismissal, so it is possible to say with certainty that in the big, bold moves -- the shape, the character, the basic floor plan -- this building is a Cardinal.

You can tell this by scanning the architect's history. Masonry curves are what Cardinal does. They have been the keys to his artistic identity since 1968, the completion date of his first major building, St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church in Red Deer, Alberta. It's a small building with astounding curved brick walls.

Cardinal's vocabulary of curves may have something to do with the landscapes he absorbed during his boyhood in western Canada. Likewise, his connection to his Native American roots -- Cardinal is Blackfoot and Metis -- played its part.

Mainly, though, this signature style evolved from Cardinal's almost mystical identification with nature. He speaks of the architect's role as a revealer of forms that are inherent in a particular site. He refers to the Washington building as a "spirit mountain," a stone building that is "an abstraction of the rock that formed this continent."

Sometimes, in organic architecture, this kind of thinking produces buildings that really do seem to grow from the site, or to complement it in compelling ways. Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater in the Pennsylvania forest is a paramount example.

But Cardinal likely would consider Wright's lyricism too literal. For him, organic architecture is more a matter of metaphysical principle -- architecture harnessing and expressing a life force.

The new building on the Mall, in any case, definitely does not feel as if it "grew" from this particular piece of land. A long time ago, before colonization, the site (between Jefferson Drive, Maryland Avenue and Third and Fourth streets SW) was a little woodland next to a creek. Yet the references in Cardinal's architecture aren't local. They're not even Appalachian. The building brings to mind the mountains and the ancient native architecture of the American Southwest.

However, accepting the artifice is something one does willingly because the architecture is so convincing. As a romantic abstraction of nature, this building really works.

It is a powerful form. Those dramatic cantilevered bands above the entrance are scintillating when seen from afar, like some natural wonder you might see in New Mexico. And when you stand far beneath the cantilevers in the museum's circular forecourt, the scale has an almost physical effect. You feel both overwhelmed and sheltered. I can't think of another architectural space quite like it.

Then there is the way those blocks of rough-cut dolomitic limestone on the wavy walls react to the sun. They love it, all day long. And it loves them. Strong shadows enliven the surfaces of the big building. And the warm earth tones, rare in Washington, add a rich new note to the Mall's palette.

The building affects your spirit. It is intimidating but also exhilarating. These opposing reactions bespeak the tension built into any effort to make a monumental building that's an obvious abstraction of natural forms or forces. It is a risky thing to do, but Cardinal makes it work here, as he did in Ottawa with the Canadian Museum of Civilization, because he did not try to imitate nature.

Rather, he set up a series of contrasts between the nature metaphor and the material reality of the building. Those blocks of limestone, for instance, do indeed suggest a mountain's rough edges. But you can't help noticing that the stones are beautifully laid in irregular courses. You can feel the masons' touch.

More subtly, you can see and sense the human intellect behind the shaping of this building. Those curves are elegant and complex. They were conceived by a sensitive, daring brain, and could have been built only with the aid of advanced computer technology.

If this makes the architecture sound like High Seriousness and no fun at all, I should dispel this impression right away. The building is, quite simply, pleasant to be around.

Strolling along the paved walkway that curves gently away from Jefferson Drive is a Sunday treat. You can sit down in the shade. Listen to the water coursing nearby. Gaze up at the building's sensational north elevation. Even false notes such as the waterfall on the northwest corner -- it rings a Disneyland bell -- do not spoil the effect.

Efficiency experts might complain that the east-facing entrance is on the wrong side because the vast majority of the museum's visitors will arrive from the west, from the direction of the Air and Space Museum and the Smithsonian and L'Enfant Plaza Metro stations. And they'd be right. A west-facing entrance would have been a tad more convenient.

Then again, visitors would miss that pleasant walk! And, more to the point, an entry facing the rising sun was a key desideratum for members of the many tribes that took part in the lengthy consultations leading up to a design. This was a native characteristic everybody agreed on.

The eastern entryway might also be called the psychological key to the design, for it engenders a face-off with the U.S. Capitol up on the Hill. The view of the great Capitol dome from the entry plaza or the broad windows of conference and reading rooms is truly unforgettable. Symbolically, for Native Americans, what could be more powerfully poignant, or vindicatory, than that?

Unfortunately, the inside of the building doesn't quite live up to the outside. The intention clearly was to make the interior spaces thrilling and meaningful in the same ways, but they just don't have the same complexity and carry.

Unhappily, it's impossible to say precisely why. It may have been the absence of Cardinal's guiding hand in the design follow-through. Budget constraints possibly played a role. Perhaps it was the concept itself. Such uncertainty became a certainty the day Cardinal was fired.

The main public space, called the Potomac, is a vast domed chamber almost immediately behind the front doors. You enter it after passing by a large, semicircular fence woven from strands of copper. It's a wow space, 120 feet high from circular hardwood floor to the tension-ring skylight at the apex of the dome.

Conceptually, this space is a cross between the triangulated atrium of I.M. Pei's National Gallery East Building directly to the north across the Mall's greensward, and Thomas U. Walter's Capitol rotunda. Like the Pei atrium, it's an exciting center of movement, of going from here to there. Like the Capitol rotunda, it is a symbolic and ceremonial centerpiece.

But even though it impressively combines elements of both, the Potomac is not quite as dynamic as the Pei atrium, nor as convincing a symbolic focal point as the Capitol rotunda. These two civic interior spaces are the best of the best in Washington, and the Potomac isn't quite on par.

Perhaps the room is just too big and empty. The scale is somehow off. All that wallboard doesn't help -- when you look up, the concentric rings of the dome look a bit flimsy. Strangely, the center point of the tension ring in the dome skylight doesn't align precisely with the center of the ceremonial floor. That woven copper fence just seems a bit fussy, a bit off. It all adds up to a disappointment.

Still, the space definitely has a distinctive allure. Crowds will pep it up a lot, as they do in Pei's space. The best place to watch it all happen will be the balconies at the third and fourth floors. Behind you are the exhibition spaces, and all around is a fascinating play of curves. There's an interesting, yin-yang contrast between the flowing, irregular curves of the lower floors and the dome's concentric rings.

Native American ceremonies and performances will take place in the Potomac, and also outside the building, on that circular entry platform and in an intimate amphitheater snuggled next to the north facade. These will sanctify the spaces for the building's primary users, and make things a lot more interesting and meaningful for the rest of us.

Throughout, there are wonderful inside-outside exchanges. The views of the Capitol from the double-height third-floor reading room. The windowed alcoves at the end of wavy hallways. The window tables in the ground-floor cafe, with gently falling water outside. I'm no fan of the cafe decor -- it's sort of Class A food court design -- but these are the best seats in the house.

Decor is what happened to several of the interiors. The ground-floor auditorium, for instance, is a nice, rounded, intimate performance space with 340 seats, but the design narrative -- a clearing in the woods under a night sky -- is as thin as the wooden battens stuck on the walls.

No question, though, that this is a welcoming building. Cardinal once spoke of it as a sheltering cave, and it's a terrific cave. There's plenty of openness but also a lot of warmth. Woods are skillfully deployed. You want to reach out and touch the hand-adzed wooden walls of the Roanoke, the museum store on the second floor.

Nor is there any doubt that this strange, magnificent artifact is a welcome addition to Washington, and to the Mall.

The scale of the Mall, after all, is grand enough to embrace a bit of difference. Actually, a lot of difference. The symbolic greensward establishes an indelible order. But behind those stately elms the Mall is a parade of architectural individuality.

To build on the Mall, you just have to follow a few simple rules about height and setbacks, which Cardinal did, and then do your best, which he also did until the spring of 1998. Thanks largely to those efforts, the new museum adds a poignant, provocative, strangely elegant note to the national parade.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

[tmg]

Washington Post Interactive Tour

[BigMac]

USA Today
October 13, 2004

National Mall is jam-packed — and losing its majestic image

By Deborah K. Dietsch

The newly opened National Museum of the American Indian in Washington was supposed to be the last building constructed on the National Mall. But anyone familiar with the history of the Mall knows that politics leaves open the possibility that more memorials and museums will be added to this majestic civic space.

Last year, Congress imposed a moratorium on future building on the Mall. But in the same bill lawmakers turned around and approved a new visitor center next to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Meanwhile, supporters of African-American and Latino museums continue to lobby for prominent spots on the Mall. And, based on the successful campaign to construct the World War II Memorial between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial, these advocates may get their way if they secure enough political support.

Soon the National Mall may grow so cluttered as to resemble a graveyard full of stone edifices to special interests. That's hardly the image envisioned by Pierre L'Enfant in 1791, when he laid out the plan for a tree-lined "place of general resort" connecting the U.S. Capitol to the White House. Or when L'Enfant's lawn was expanded during the early 1900s to create the sweeping park of today.

Constant throughout centuries of change has been the provision that the Mall be used for public gatherings and national celebrations — for the Mall is the people's park, an expanse representing the openness and the optimism of our democracy. Crowds gather on the Mall to celebrate the Fourth of July and to enjoy festivals and concerts. They march along its gravel paths and grassy turf to support social causes and to protest war and injustice.

Open vistas blocked

But as many visitors have recently discovered, the Mall's dignified setting continues to be compromised. The WWII memorial has changed forever the central vista: Within its sunken plaza, the view of the Lincoln Memorial is completely blocked by its star-studded wall. To the east, new security walls are being constructed in a wide circle around the Washington Monument that will restrict access to its grounds and will also change the view.

In addition to the Vietnam Wall's mini-museum, no doubt other exceptions will follow. The sponsors of the National Museum of African American History and Culture make the persuasive argument that an institution devoted to our nation's long, troubled history of slavery and oppression is deserving of prime real estate on the Mall.

But adding more museums and memorials — no matter how well intentioned — would only detract further from the Mall's grandeur.

Open spaces for public demonstrations and celebrations would disappear, too. Remember those who gathered to hear Martin Luther King Jr.'s inspiring "I Have a Dream" speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial? The sunken WWII memorial blocks some of the area where those crowds once stood.

Inspiring vistas would be blocked and national symbols overshadowed. Imagine having your view of the Washington Monument obscured by a block-long building. That's what would happen should sponsors of the African-American museum get their way and construct their museum just to the northeast of the historic obelisk.

The Mall would become a theme park of isolated tourist attractions with visitors shuttling between exhibits and remembrances. Gift shops, visitor centers and restrooms are already in place as part of memorials to Franklin D. Roosevelt and World War II.

One way to prevent further erosion of the Mall's precious open space is to designate a single authority to preserve its integrity. Today, no one governmental body oversees the Mall or sets policy to guide its future. Instead, Mall control is divided among congressional committees and federal agencies, each with its own agenda.

Who's in charge?

"There is no joint purpose and joint management, and little opportunity for meaningful public participation or scrutiny of the planning process," says a new report from the National Coalition to Save Our Mall, a non-profit group that held workshops this year to develop a strategy for stewardship.

What's needed, the group asserts, is new management of the Mall. This could take the form of a public-private partnership between the National Park Service and a non-profit group, emulating the way the Central Park Conservancy manages Central Park under a contract with New York City's parks department. Such stewardship would help encourage public involvement in this most public of resources and provide a vehicle for interpreting, restoring and improving the Mall's historic landscape.

But it will take more than new management to secure the Mall's future. Sponsors of new museums and memorials must be convinced that building off the Mall is as desirable as building on the Mall. And Congress must be willing to stand its ground.

Deborah K. Dietsch is a writer on architecture and design.

© Copyright 2004 USA TODAY

[Kris]

Congress Supports Institute of Peace Headquarters Project

[Kris]

Mixed Smoke Signals

[Kris]

8 Bid to Design Nationals' Stadium

Architects to Oversee Timetable and Budget for Construction

By David Nakamura
Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, February 23, 2005; Page B01

Eight architectural firms entered bids yesterday to become the chief designer of a new baseball stadium for the Washington Nationals, a project that city leaders have described as a chance to create an iconic ballpark along the Anacostia River.

The companies met the proposal deadline imposed by the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission, which hopes to select a lead architect within three weeks. Among the competitors are some of the leading sports stadium designers in the country and internationally renowned architect Rafael Vinoly, who designed the Tokyo International Forum and the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia. Some of the firms have teamed up with companies that specialize in large D.C. projects and urban planning.

A six-member committee will review the applications over the coming week and determine how many groups to bring in for interviews. The committee will have two representatives each from the sports commission, the office of Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) and Major League Baseball. Allen Y. Lew, chief executive of the sports commission, will make the final selection with input from the committee and his board of directors, officials said.

"We want a good, functional baseball stadium that MLB and the team can be proud of," said Mark H. Tuohey, chairman of the sports commission. "At the same time, we want a facility that does reflect the nation's capital."

The choice of an architect is important for several reasons. City leaders view the architect as crucial to ensuring that the ballpark opens by March 2008 and stays on budget, $279 million for construction. They also hope that a stadium near the Navy Yard and South Capitol Street in Southeast Washington can help spark economic development in a largely neglected area. Major League Baseball, which owns the Nationals, wants a facility designed to draw large crowds and to offer attractions that encourage them to spend money inside the ballpark.

The sports commission has called on firms to be creative and not simply mimic other stadiums. The consensus among commission members, city leaders and architects is that the stadium will not be of the red brick throwback model popularized by Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

The firms that presented proposals are: Rafael Vinoly Architects; Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum Sport; Skidmore, Owings and Merrill; Ehrenkrantz Eckstut and Kuhn Architects; Harwood K. Smith Architects; HNTB Architects; EwingCole; and David M. Schwarz Architects.

Some representatives of these firms said their proposals were not detailed but were designed to answer the sports commission's basic requirements, such as ensuring that the companies could provide $50 million in insurance and meet a provision that more than half the employees working on the project are from the District. They said that they will be more specific about design ideas if they are called for an interview.

"We didn't hold anything back," said Carrie Plummer, a spokeswoman for Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum Sport, which has designed 10 of the 14 newest baseball stadiums, including San Francisco's SBC Park and Pittsburgh's PNC Park. "We put together the best design team. This is a dream project because of its iconic potential."

The sports commission released only the names of the lead architects, but several firms combined with others to present their bids. For example, Ehrenkrantz Eckstut and Kuhn Architects, which has roots in Washington, has joined with Minneapolis-based Ellerbe Becket as well as Janet Marie Smith, who designed Oriole Park and is a consultant for the Boston Red Sox on a redesign of Fenway Park.

"We have one seamless team, although we have people who are good at different things," said Matthew Bell, a principal with Ehrenkrantz Eckstut and Kuhn.

Schwarz designed the Ballpark at Arlington for the Texas Rangers; EwingCole did Philadelphia's Citizens Bank Park; and HNTB designed Invesco Field for the Denver Broncos football team.

Harwood K. Smith Architects has designed basketball arenas and Miller Park for the Milwaukee Brewers. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill's Web site says the company has designed office, government, school and residential buildings; and Vinoly's site says he has done residential buildings and an airport terminal in Japan, as well as other projects.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

[RedFerrari360f1]

It had better not look like a traditional stadium with lots of brick and rafters exsposed, DC deserves better.

[Douglas Willinger]

" The two plans are in basic agreement. Both call for new, mixed-use neighborhoods in the city's eastern segments. Both emphasize mass transit and new transportation infrastructure. Both advocate an active, urbane Anacostia waterfront.

The Legacy plan foresees spreading the cultural wealth of memorials and museums beyond Washington's monumental core. The Anacostia planners rightfully embraced this inspired idea in proposals for major parks on both sides of the river at either end of the South Capitol Street Bridge. "

With regard to South Capital Street, the two plans are about as different as the National Mall and K Street.

This is the "Legacy" plan. Note the monumental green way.

http://www.ncpc.gov/publications_pre...docs/cover.pdf

This is the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative. Note the new real estate developement jammed against the existing 130' right of way.

http://planning.dc.gov/planning/cwp/...v_GID,1708.asp

The Washington Post does the public a disservice with this sort of "reporting."

Douglas A. Willinger
Takoma Park Highway Design Studio
http://www.HighwaysAndCommunities.com
]

[Douglas Willinger]

8 Bid to Design Nationals' Stadium

Architects to Oversee Timetable and Budget for Construction

By David Nakamura
Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, February 23, 2005; Page B01

Eight architectural firms entered bids yesterday to become the chief designer of a new baseball stadium for the Washington Nationals, a project that city leaders have described as a chance to create an iconic ballpark along the Anacostia River. [snip]
---

If the authorities insist upon letting this project proceed, the stadium location must be shifted about 300' north-east.

Otherwise, it complicates construction of the proposed South Capital Street corridor vehicular tunnel connecting I-395 and I-295, introduces possible security concerns from placing terrorist target of stadium full of spectators within site of U.S. Capitol rotunda directly atop highway tunnel (note that I-395 runs west of the Capitol, not directly beneath it), and commits the planning attrocity of blocking the National Capital Planning Commission's aclaimed "Legacy" plan for a monumental green way along a reconfigured South Capital Street.

Do these architects want to take credit for establishing a stadium as part of a greater monumental Washington, D.C., or do they merely want to collect pay checks for participating in the blocking of the South Capital Street Mall?

Douglas A. Willinger
Takoma Park Highway Design Studio
http://www.HighwaysAndCommunities.com