Posts by Neil Flanagan

Housing AU's students poses problems for administrators and locals alike. The university currently has 6,124 undergraduate students, with only half students housed on-campus. The remaining half live in houses and apartment dispersed throughout the surrounding neighborhoods. Even on-campus housing is less than ideal. Students live in cramped triples and in the Berkshire apartment building.

Having students live in the surrounding neighborhoods causes complications and occasional conflicts. Among other things, some students drive to campus. Moving more students into walking distance will save energy, reduce needless traffic, and cut drunk driving. But more importantly, it may help diffuse tensions between locals and students.

AU is offering a variety of housing styles in their new buildings. Suites and apartment style living join most of the social benefits of group houses with the conveniences of dorms. Moreover, with nicer facilities and fewer cramped rooms, students will be even more inclined to live in university housing. Once they have rooms to party in, students have fewer reasons to form off-campus party houses and fewer reasons to negatively impact the neighborhood.

The new beds will benefit the community by themselves. The buildings that contain those beds and the campus surrounding them can also benefit all other residents of the DC area, through good design.

West of Ward Circle, university buildings will flank Nebraska avenue, opening up potential for a remarkable space that extends the original campus onto the new one. Already, he elimination of the ugly parking lots will improve the area. Good design would make it world-class.

With thoughtful space planning and attractive details, the campus can be a joy to inhabit and pleasant for non-students to pass through. It is possible to design to minimize light and noise pollution. As for density, the floor-area-ratio for the whole campus will only increase from 0.5 to 0.8. There will be plenty of park space left over.

Redesigning Nebraska is in the mutual interest of the city and the university. Nebraska connects American's campuses and it connects the school to the city. A boulevardized street with multiple pedestrian crossings, improved bicycle facilities, and a usable Ward Circle would transform Nebraska from a dull arterial to the great avenue planners imagined it would be.

The ANCs, neighborhood groups and the university need to work together to craft a plan that matches American University's needs with a refined implementation that benefits the community. Constructive dialogue, formal commitments, and community benefits will make an acceptable plan into one tat could be a model of academic planning.

The site has tremendous potential to make Upper Northwest more walkable and more sustainable. Moving the law school closer to the Tenleytown-AU metro station will reduce the net amount of traffic along Nebraska and Massachusetts Avenues. To get to the current law school building, students and faculty can either drive to the generous parking garage, or take the AU shuttle from Tenleytown.

That access to the Tenleytown metro is especially important to these law students, because most live outside the neighborhood and merely commute in for the school day. Likewise, the Immaculata campus sits right on several bus lines — and a potential streetcar line — that will receive efficiency improvements through TIGER Grants.

As a side benefit, the new school would put more foot traffic along the southern block of Tenleytown's retail area. The current shuttle buses isolates students from neighbors; the three-block walk down Wisconsin would put them face-to face on the main strip. The steady stream of students and faculty would patronize stores and restaurants and justify streetscape improvements that will make Tenleytown nicer for everyone.

On Nebraska Avenue, a well-designed campus would significantly improve the urban architecture of one of DC's monumental boulevards. Against the other streets, a good architect would be able to make the building disappear into the trees that line the perimeter of the campus. Because the university has no plans or even a design architect yet, the possibilities for integrating the school into the neighborhood are vast. The campus plan is the right opportunity to ask for them.

For all of the potential benefits, the College of Law could still hurt the neighborhood. American could ask for an introverted suburban campus and receive an eyesore and a traffic nightmare. The negotiation between the ANC and the university administration will allow for specific terms of approval to be stated. Design guidelines, operations requirements, and community benefits can be spelled out ahead of time to ensure that both sides gain from the construction and trust is not broken.

American University's plan is good at first glance. Whether it is good for the next fifty years will depend on how well residents and the university work together to make a lasting improvement to the city.

Cross posted on цarьchitect.

The front (north) façade is a beautiful composition of frosted glass formed into a curtain. From the side of practicality, the east-facing façade of the office wing is fenestrated and shaded reasonably well for actual daylighting instead of a glass sheet.

The architects fell into some contemporary tropes I dislike. Some of the lines are arbitrarily harsh and unanimated. The glass curtain in front ends bluntly at the roof slab. Likewise, the entrance doesn't stand out on a building that already doesn't address the street well.

Admittedly, it is a diplomatic building, so security concerns will cause designers to skew fortress-like and the surrounding neighborhood is hilly and wooded, full of detached mansions like the Hillwood. Given that, maybe disappearing into the environment is the best course here.

The grass roof slips the building into its site. And if it's not near public transit, it is near great bicycle resources. The shady Rock Creek trail is just feet from the entrance. If the Czechs get on the same bike bandwagon as the Danes and install some changing facilities (it's not clear from the published images if they have them), then it could be a pretty forward-thinking building.

Cross-posted at Цarьchitect. Hat tip to Dezeen.

Proponents of ground-supported streetcars have emphasized that rail-based vehicles did once crisscross the city. However, the press release seeks to preempt this criticism by arguing that that was an unfortunate aberration. "Washington, DC has a strong tradition of rail-free streets dating back to 1964, when city fathers fought hard to eliminate the unsightly and segregated street-rail system in favor of more democratic buses. Even in the transit-friendly times of the 1950s, the general public recognized that surface rails were an affront to America's cultural heritage."

Margarita Masguerra, a representative of OMGWTFBBQ, insists her group fully supports the construction of streetcars. "The petition we are circulating emphasizes that we want to see diverse transit options for residents. Buses are not enough, sure. But streetcar tracks would be so devastating to the city's image of large automobile boulevards that we want DDOT to stop and consider other options. "In Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine and Ponca City, Oklahoma, systems have been explored that employ no rails at all," she continued, "although we do not understand how these systems work."

"Certain models from Boston and Philadelphia apparently hang from wires suspended above the line, creating the strongly defined structure that our organization recognizes as attracting growth." Ms. Masguerra pointed out the results she had seen, but commented, "Speaking only for myself, I have been to Amsterdam and Dallas, and had there not been any rails, I think the streets with cafes and buildings could have been really nice places."

Support for the group's petition has come from a wide range of interest groups. Lon Anderson of the Mid-Atlantic chapter of the American Automobile Association questions the need for surface transit at all. "OMGWTFBBQ are too polite about the nonsense logic of these railroad people. If they want streetcars, can't they just put more rails in the subway?"

Other opponents have raised the danger that in-ground tracks might pose to pedestrians. The increased incidence of tripping and stubbed toes is a genuine concern for small-footed locals. Amanda Hess, writing in the City Paper's Sexist blog, commented that "rails may disproportionately harm women, who are much more likely to be wearing heels," saying that the supporters might have darker motives.

"The image of a woman fallen onto the rails of a train merely recapitulates a sexist image of a woman in need of saving before a big scary train," she wrote. "Sorry, the train died with vaudeville. No doubt, there are many 'Nice Guy' transit fans just waiting for this possibility. Just because you help a woman up, doesn't mean she wants you to take her back to your apartment for a little dissertation on railway signaling. Trust me, she probably doesn't want to see your lunar signal, vintage or not."

But even OMGWTFBBQ is willing to compromise and look at a variety of systems. The petition highlights the Wuppertal Schwebebahn, which suspends its rails in the air. "It's a great system." Masguerra says, "They're hardly visible from the ground." Another system mentioned is the Demontierbares Klappenschienenschutzsystem under consideration in Tübingen, Germany and Alexandria, Egypt.

That technology employs panels that cover the rails when a train is not nearby. The tops of the panels can be inlaid with various road materials. When a train approaches the section of track, the panels lift up to reveal the rails and close when the train leaves. Also featured was Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik's guided semi-rigid airship system, which has been installed between 25 malls and 14 skyscrapers in Dubai.

Masguerra insists that her organization's sole interest is in improving transit in the DC area. "Again, I just want to reiterate that we want to see streetcars in Washington," she says, "And we're committed to exploring all options to make that happen without rails."

The street condition is undefined, bounded by the tapestries except at three prominent areas. The axis of Maryland Avenue cuts through the memorial, with the stone ring in the center. Building the memorial without disrupting the viewshed of the Capitol or traffic flow were seen as the two big problems. The Memorial Commission selected a design that sidesteps the issue of sightlines by removing one of eight columns and two sections of the screens. This way, the design frames the primary view of the Capitol with the same structures that fit it into the grid.

The panel rejected other alternatives that maintained a vehicular Maryland Avenue road through the monument. Instead, they chose to create a pedestrian plaza. The site, adjacent to the Mall, tries to moves the monumental program off of the Mall and drawing visitors, most of whom tour on foot.

Gehry has tamed his own style for this project, although the ring of stones exemplifies the blockish forms he had been experimenting with since the opening of Walt Disney Hall. Mercifully, Gehry has also eschewed the dismal expressionism of a younger generation of memorial designers. The design team did not try to assign tremendous meaning to every little detail. Instead, it is a building that can be judged for its power and for its beauty, although people will disagree.

Last year, the Post's architecture critic Philip Kennicott called for a new "language" of memorialization. Gehry partly delivers, but the project also contains overt references to the neoclassical precedents around DC. The memorial succeeds because of them, even as it inverts some and adds a few new details.

The large screens are the most novel idea of the entire memorial. They expand the sculptural program to a gigantic scale, reaching eighty feet into the air. During the daytime, the might shade the interior space. At night the model shows them lit from the courtyard, more clearly revealing the content to Independence Avenue.

Gehry revisits some older ideas as well. Although the Mall hasn't seen memorial trees in a century, they once formed a good part of the commemorative landscape and this monument contains one as the centerpiece of the ring of rectangular monoliths.

On the faces of each block, reliefs will relate significant moments of in the career of the soldier and president. Relief sculpture has been less popular as part of DC's monumental landscape. In no other memorial is it the primary form of representation. The models show large images extending to the edges of each block, almost like a digital photograph or television image. We do not want to be trapped by our technology, but the gesture toward on-screen representation does seem fresh. However, fifteen years later, the once-exotic etchings on the Korean War Veterans Memorial feel thin and inexpressive. Now, the media are moving into 3-D for its effect, so this design follows the trend back into tradition.

If the sculptural style looks promising, the columns that support the screens already disappoint. In the model, they appear too much like the dowels used to represent the shafts, and not enough like real pieces of architecture. They are mute and unattractive. Compare them to the colonnade on the Lincoln Memorial, where Henry Bacon emphasized permanence and with the beauty and connotations of the Doric order. At the Eisenhower Memorial, little can be said about the columns because the columns say so little. Gehry may not have made a grand colonnade, but he did design a great rotunda.

The ensemble at the heart of the memorial evokes a humble country life — Mayberry, even. Eisenhower was never a fortunate son; rural life bookended his life and formed his character. Born in Abiline, Kansas, and retiring to a farm in Gettysburg, the great deeds and great words that surround the bucolic centerpiece suggest a practical man thrust into history. This particular relationship is the most powerful image presented by the monument. On another level, planting a landscape at the center of a circular memorial references Jefferson. Even as monuments crumble, the ensemble seems to suggest, the self-sustaining farm life continues Eisenhower's legacy.

The other images will come later, so we do not yet know the style or the artist, or even the content. How these artworks will convey complex achievements like the occupation of Europe or interstate highway system remains uncertain. The Civil Rights Movement, which grew more powerful and accomplished key victories had relatively little to to with Ike. Again, the metaphor of simplicity surrounded by greatness will guide visitors to examine what made the man rather than what the man made.

Before the collectible shovels even hit the ground, this design will come under review by the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission. More importantly, translating the model-driven architecture of Frank Gehry into physical designs will require substantial thought, such as how to humanize those columns. The sculptural program will be contentious as well. Recognizing a man who was a baseball coach, an officer, a college president, General Of the Armies, and President of the United States will be challenging. Gehry and the many agencies that oversee the mall must cooperate to produce the most affecting and communicative architecture possible.

The memorial is trying to be taken seriously. Gehry has said that his own military experience in 1955-1957 motivated him to work on this particular project, and that he holds particular respect for the man who was Commander-in-Chief during that time. Some people will never like Frank Gehry. His cavalier style can feel like an insult to care and effort. Although this is just a cultivated image, this memorial must transcend his style to be recognized as a monument to Eisenhower. Based on what was displayed yesterday, with a little hard work, the monument could be one of Washington's best.

Now, the names of the neighborhoods today are not any better than the ones lost to time. Just for example, here's how Wikipedia divides the area, based on real estate convention:

Neighborhoods according to Wikipedia.

Here, neighborhood divisions pass right through the centers of activity, such as on Wisconsin Ave. By this map, the vast majority of what people regard as Tenleytown is not in Tenleytown, such as the Janney School, Cityline at Tenley, and the Tenley-Friendship Library hole. It is as though the places where most neighborhood activity occurs have no bearing on the official geography. With that in mind, I asked some friends where neighborhoods begin and end. Here's what I came up with:

Neighborhoods designated by residents.

In my opinion, this map reflects the general image of neighborhoods better, especially in the way it characterizes Tenleytown, but it's still somewhat imperfect. For example, the Comet Corner node at Connecticut and Nebraska is still stuck between Chevy Chase, Forest Hills, and Tobago. Or, take the Van Ness hub, which is technically split between Forest Hills and North Cleveland Park. And, good lord, parts of AU park are a mile from American's main campus.

Now, crumby names may not actually harm the businesses at these locations, but I have found it strangely hard to explain to outsiders how to get to Politics & Prose. It just does not exist on the mental maps of most inhabitants of the region. The lack of landmarks or a transportation node might be one reason it's unremarkable, but the fact that people have spontaneously named the area suggests that area is not so much lacking as the naming system is itself insufficient.

Although a line is drawn down the middle of Wisconsin Avenue, a person will not feel that the neighborhood changed when he or she crosses the street. Both sides of the street sit in the same space – and one perceives them as the same place. So, from an urbanist standpoint, it makes more sense to approach neighborhood names through the experience of space and human activity.

In the next post, I explore an alternative.

Over a dozen neighbors from all over Tenleytown worked together to open up paths and make walking safe and easy again, including Ben Nieva, Mike Sires, Steve Kelley, Athan Manuel, Angie Das, Hedda Garland, Felix Garland, Jenny McCarthy and Chris Frantz, as well as some whose names Neil might not have recorded.

That group focused on the street corners, which had become less passable with every visit by the plows. The delay of one day had allowed most owners and businesses to clear their sidewalks, but the hardening slush in the streets was still tripping people up. They even put down some salt and sand provided by the local Ace hardware store. The Current sent out a reporter, who also recorded an audio segment for WAMU.

Unfortunately, snow on many busy sidewalks had already condensed into packs of ice, preventing the group from clearing more. David and Rob were only able to clear about 60% of the sidewalk across Connecticut Avenue after two hours.

Many businesses and organizations also deserve attention for their lack of effort. In Tenleytown, Neisha Thai and several other establishments south of the Metro stood out. Circle Management left their construction site next to the Metro uncleared, while they or their tenants fulfilled the responsibility on the rest of their properties.

The Georgetown Day School shoveled its 42nd Street Sidewalks well enough, but its long stretch of sidewalk on River Road was left completely untouched. Finally, the National Park Service proved the worst offender, shoveling none of their many properties around Tenleytown. There are similar stories in neighborhoods all around the region.

But while other people let down their neighbors, it was reassuring to see so many people out on a snow day, helping each other out. Everyone came away knowing the others a little better as well.