Washington, D.C., is a metropolis self-consciously styled, since its founding, to resemble historic Rome. The neoclassicism of the White Home and of the Capitol constructing, the now-tunnelized Tiber Creek on the Mall, and Jefferson’s naming of Capitol Hill after Rome’s Capitoline Hill all attest to this superb. And simply as Rome’s structure advanced to replicate its imperial ambition, so too has D.C.’s adopted America’s evolution from younger republic to the world’s reigning superpower. We are inclined to affiliate extra conventional architectural kinds with manifestations of energy projection, however for this very motive, it’s not the Beaux-Arts of the Gilded Age, New Deal moderne, or Chilly Conflict Brutalism that greatest expresses the American imperial model.
Quite, it’s the post-1989 steel-and-glass “high-tech” buildings of the previous 30 years that signify America’s world dominance—transparency standing in for democracy, restrained massing for pragmatism, and structural precision for the effectivity of technocratic administration.
Out of the gloomy beige of the Chilly Conflict dawned a very globalized financial system. Responding to the “finish of historical past,” D.C.’s structure shed the standard markers of that historical past, be it Roman marble or the Nice Society’s concrete. Even the hardly hinted remnants of the classical orders nonetheless current in Brutalism had been stripped away in favor of a extra tectonic language of mullions and members, metal ties and panel reveals. The high-tech model was pioneered within the late Nineteen Sixties by architects Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano, and Norman Foster, in celebration of the emancipatory potential of cybernetic applied sciences. However their early experiments—which elevated flexibility by permitting construction and air flow programs to drift freed from partitions—had been already co-opted for banks, factories, and company workplaces by the early Eighties. On the time in D.C., development of federal authorities workplace area had slowed dramatically, with the stability of the area’s new growth shifting to suburban workplace parks in Northern Virginia and Maryland, the exception being a slew of headquarters for brand spanking new lobbying companies alongside Okay, L, and M Streets.
Two landmark tasks of the Nineteen Nineties introduced the brand new model to downtown D.C.: the World Financial institution Group headquarters constructing and the brand new Nationwide Airport terminals by César Pelli, each accomplished in 1997. The World Financial institution, flush with new belongings to handle and privatize from the nationwide economies of the previous Japanese Bloc, tapped Kohn Pedersen Fox (which had but to abbreviate its title) for its new headquarters. For the design, architect Gene Kohn included two present buildings on the location, whose staid volumes and unimaginative concrete finishes had outlined Washington workplace development for many years. If a lot of the work of knitting the previous with the brand new was labored out in part, Kohn additionally made expressive, if perfunctory, use of massing. Extra impressed was the constructing’s major facade on H Road, unusually clear for the time, and its grand midblock atrium. The previous was tightly gridded as if to signify the dominance of Excel as a brand new monetary instrument, whereas the latter offered an anomalous (for D.C.) vertical counterpoint. The atrium’s vaulted glass cover was supported by columns frayed on the ends like unwound web cables, whereas a 28-foot waterfall added an surprising notice of caprice. Economists must daydream too.
This technocratic exuberance was greatest captured by Foster’s 1992 competition-winning proposal for the reconstruction of the Reichstag dome, accomplished in Berlin in 1999. Retrograde anticapitalist forces had been soundly defeated by market forces, with Germany reunited in a nonthreatening and democratic type. However Foster’s glass dome atop the German parliament got here to represent the victory of freedom worldwide, its elegant ramps a metaphor for particular person ascent by private alternative and the seen connections of its metal members making evident the superior effectivity of a synergized world. That literal transparency and frictionless technical precision may visually stand in for a brand new American-led neoliberal world order was not misplaced on D.C.’s architectural clientele.
Whereas numerous different workplaces and business developments started to discover the high-tech model, it was Terminals B and C of Nationwide Airport (Ronald Reagan Washington Nationwide Airport to non-D.C. folks) that accelerated architectural change in and across the metropolis. Designed by Pelli across the identical time because the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia—the world’s tallest buildings upon their opening in 1998—the brand new terminals featured a sequence of vibrant yellow domes supported by bushes of metal members. Of their articulation the domes shrink back from curves in favor of a composition of tangents, aggregating and approximating quite than delivering easy type—maybe Reichstags in miniature. As the primary main and well-loved public undertaking within the space in fairly a while, the airport enlargement had an outsize affect on the course of design in D.C. within the a long time forward.
Nevertheless, a lot of what adopted, although aspiring maybe to match the ambition of the airport, achieved quite mediocre outcomes. The MCI Middle (now Capital One Enviornment) and the Walter E. Washington Conference Middle each introduced the mullion-and-panel language deeper into downtown, an early signal of the slowing tempo of suburbanization and twin kickoffs for revitalization and gentrification. Each additionally traded formal refinement for scale, taking over total metropolis blocks and fronting streets with clean tan panels. The banality of those strip mall–like developments was alleviated solely by glass towers at essential corners or the kind of glass-and-steel cover fashioned by extruding the wavering line of a felt-tip pen—easy branding workouts.
The design of clear buildings turned extra fraught after September 11, because the heavy and stable visible language of safety obstacles, bollards, and blast-proof elements introduced an altogether “chunky” proportional system to bear. In airports, previously diaphanous concourses had been stuffed with TSA checkpoints, and gestures of welcome and arrival had been subsumed inside makeshift plywood partitions, the bodily precipitate of the Patriot Act. The spatial group of Baghdad’s Inexperienced Zone was quickly mirrored in D.C. by the mid-2000s because the streets surrounding the White Home had been blocked off, street-level facades of public buildings had been retrofitted, and excursions of the areas of presidency canceled.
And but the crucial to signify democracy, freedom, and different ideological constructs with transparency and structural legibility continued to drive new structure within the nation’s capital, now taking over an altogether extra militaristic tinge. New midfield concourses at Dulles Airport combined expressive components—a central backbone composed of suspended cable trusses—with the pragmatic, buttoned-down grey panels of a shed on a military base. Gentle-gray surfaces started to exchange glass, and omnipresent American flags rendered quotidian structural components into reminders of George W. Bush’s “mission achieved” photograph op—in spite of everything, plane carriers are additionally high-tech buildings. The mullion-and-canopy model was quickly adopted as an overt illustration of the navy, in buildings as disparate because the Marine Corps Museum (2006) and the Division of Homeland Safety’s consolidated headquarters. Such a development is comparatively fast and low-cost, in spite of everything, accommodating the dual options of Twenty first-century authorities: enlargement of security-oriented governmental workplaces and simultaneous, but paradoxical, nervousness concerning the deficit.
This bland model of high-tech structure carried over into the general public realm, with a number of current expansions of the Metro system and the renewed growth these have generated in neighborhoods like NoMa, Columbia Heights, and Tysons Nook, Virginia. The brand new underground stations take inspiration from Harry Weese’s iconic and much-celebrated Brutalist coffered vaults however render them into thinner, nearly decorative appliqué. Aboveground canopies on the NoMa-Gallaudet or Tysons stations have totally adopted the militarized airport-style—chunky members cobbled collectively right into a free metaphor for flight, as in liberty or victory—floating uneasily over unnecessarily huge concrete viaducts. Metro’s new prepare automobiles themselves have additionally taken on the look of the brand new imperial model. Pixelated fritting patterns on the pure-silver exteriors and glass dividers inside take away what was distinctive concerning the older automobiles—funky oranges and browns—and exchange them with the frictionless gridded grays and gunmetals of navy computing programs.
Whereas current public works in D.C. are of the identical aesthetic register as a protection contractor’s PowerPoint slide, the personal sector has proliferated mullion-and-canopy buildings all through D.C., Maryland, and Virginia with barely extra verve. Giant new mixed-use tasks resembling The Wharf and CityCenterDC had been constructed through the so-called “Obama growth,” an acceleration of downtown growth regardless of the 2008 monetary disaster, accommodating professionals—largely employed by lobbying companies, protection contractors, and suppose tanks essential to working a Twenty first-century empire—shifting again to densifying neighborhoods and theoretically extra sustainable glass residence buildings. However even hometown critics haven’t been wowed by this glut of growth. In a 2016 Washington Publish roundup of the “10 Buildings You Should See,” Annys Shin wrote, “The business structure of the brand new Washington skews trendy however stops in need of avant-garde,” with the acerbic commentary of 1 construction that “if glass buildings are the khaki pants of D.C. structure, this constructing is a pair of flat fronts in a gentle olive shade.”
Constrained by D.C.’s peak restrict, the brand new glass buildings bulk as much as the total extent of allowable FAR, hewing to near-identical silhouettes distinguishable solely by the numerous canopies, trellises, and jauntily angled crowns. The brand new class of execs, maybe priced out of dwelling possession, press of their glass bins in opposition to the stays of neighborhoods hit onerous by the riots of ’68 and ensuing waves of disinvestment. Additionally they press into the republic-era metropolis of white marble and encompass it, hypothesis on warfare and peace fueling actual property hypothesis in flip. That mentioned, the glass-and-steel, extremely tectonic, mullion-and-canopy, technocratic-imperial model of post-’89 D.C. structure will not be so dangerous, particularly in comparison with the Trump-mandated oligarchic-thicc classical. However architects, in addition to most people, should stay vigilant about what our constructed surroundings communicates, and whether or not it has the capability to energise our political creativeness, or just displays an order that we at the moment are powerless to vary.
A.J. Artemel was born and raised in Alexandria, Virginia, and has witnessed D.C.’s architectural growth from 1989 to the current firsthand.