It's either Bethesda or Rockville, I think.

by Nate on Oct 21, 2008 1:01 pm • link • report

It's Bethesda Lane near Bethesda Row.

by Kevin on Oct 21, 2008 1:13 pm • link • report

Definitely Bethesda, nearly Arlington and Elm.

by Dale on Oct 21, 2008 1:13 pm • link • report

Arlington East. Bethesda, MD. Torti Gallas Architects

http://www.tortigallaschk.com/project.asp?p=184810

Does the restaurant there ever put out any outdoor seating? The last time I was there (middle of the summer) they had all the windows closed and nothing outside. Seems like a missed opportunity on that great mews street to not have more prevalent outdoor seating.

by Jim on Oct 21, 2008 1:14 pm • link • report

As my sister in B-town likes to call it: Diagon Alley.

by Mary on Oct 21, 2008 1:16 pm • link • report

Redwood is on that street. Really nice, classy restaurant. Expensive, but good.

by Lindsey on Oct 21, 2008 1:18 pm • link • report

I have never seen a car on Bethesda Lane. They've got the little bollards on both ends, you know, just in case terrorists decide to drive a truck in there and blow up the gelato shop.

by dan reed on Oct 21, 2008 1:28 pm • link • report

Dan, you're funny. I don't (usually) take potshots at the more insular and well-to-do side of the county, but I do laugh at them.

by Cavan on Oct 21, 2008 1:35 pm • link • report

It's cool how the three buildings that surround the street, while all part of the same project, appear to have three different architectural styles. It's a really nicely done project, especially compared to the combination of blandness and trying-too-hard that a lot of new buildings these days can't seem to escape.

by Keith Wright on Oct 21, 2008 1:42 pm • link • report

If only Rockville could have done such a good job with their new town center ... The idea to resurect the original downtown was a good one, but the cooky-cutter alternating facades on buildings of all the same heights give the feeling of an improvement done "on the cheap". Hopefully 'time' will give each of the buildings a uniqueness that is now lacking. Perhaps better restaurants would help too ..

by Lance on Oct 21, 2008 3:18 pm • link • report

I don't think this was such a good job. The street itself is very nice - though lining most of one side with one restaurant and a long, blank wall is kind of lame - but the box it came in is terrible. The scale of the building along Bethesda Avenue is really overwhelming. Not to mention the triumphal-arch thing that forms one entrance to the new street, which couldn't be more pretentious. I'll admit they paid much more attention to detail here than in Rockville, but all of those details don't come together to form a pleasing whole.

by dan reed on Oct 21, 2008 3:31 pm • link • report

[url=http://z.about.com/d/cruises/1/0/M/R/3/arc_de_triomphe02.jpg]I[/url] [url=http://www.toanyplace.com/logos/DupontCircle.jpg]wish[/url] [url=http://www.ego4u.com/images/countries/uk/london/trafalgar-square01.jpg]our[/url] [url=http://www.casayego.com/europeancities/rome/rome-f.jpg]urban[/url] [url=http://beyonddc.com/galleries/UnionStation/images/c100_3052.jpg]art[/url] [url=http://beyonddc.com/privatesets/2006jan-CapHill/images/ab100_7723.jpg]were[/url] [url=http://beyonddc.com/privatesets/2006jan-CapHill/images/bd100_7711.jpg]more[/url] [url=http://www.new-york-city-travel.net/images/attractions/statue-of-liberty.jpg]pretentious[/url].

Pretentious is a million times better [url=http://lh6.ggpht.com/_jBPX0MdDkSQ/RQNuvAxqABI/AAAAAAAAA4A/ufDOf1ZQ15Y/Picture+029.jpg]than[/url] [url=http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3024/2573375290_9f5af6f07d.jpg?v=1213298271]this[/url] [url=http://www.rockvillemd.gov/arts/towncenter/6-kraft.jpg]crap[/url].

by BeyondDC on Oct 21, 2008 4:04 pm • link • report

(take two)

I wish our urban art were more pretentious.

Pretentious is a million times better than this crap.

by BeyondDC on Oct 21, 2008 4:06 pm • link • report

Architectural preferences aside, it is good that it added more foot traffic and more use to an already walkable area. We're still not out of the clear of modernist car dependent land uses to get cocky about any walkable development.

Regardless of how it looks, I think we can agree it's better than a strip mall.

by Cavan on Oct 21, 2008 4:18 pm • link • report

I, a diehard modern movement fanboy who will likely stand in front of the bulldozers in front of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, think this is a very nice place. I have plenty of quibbles with TGA's particular implementation, but the things that really count for street life are excellently done. The textures and rhythms of the storefronts are great, the street furniture is great, the clever fountains, the beautiful willow oaks, the pavement, and the uses conspire to make it a great place to spend time in.

BeyondDC: Pretentious public art is good in civic buildings. This is not a public, let alone civic, place. The arch is fine in concept, but it's a tad overdesigned. It's an upper-upscale row of boutiques and chains. It's fine for what it is, but it should know its place in the urban fabric like any good arcade. When I stand back and look at the block, I feel a tremendous emptiness and confusion because it is so prosaic and yet so pompous.

Cavan: take back that claim that car-oriented culture is exclusively Modernist. Who designed the triple-decker streets of Chicago? What was Robert Moses' view of the International Style? For how long have Americans wanted little private lots? Le Corbusier was an artist. Where do you think he got his ideas on urbanism?

by The King of Spain on Oct 21, 2008 5:13 pm • link • report

I agree that pretentious public art is good in civic buildings.

But unless you're prepared to argue that the building on the left is better than the buildings on the right (and I pray to good taste that you're not), it's good in private buildings too.

by BeyondDC on Oct 22, 2008 9:23 am • link • report

> take back that claim that car-oriented culture is exclusively Modernist

Here's the problem: Regardless of history or intentions, modernism by its very nature is minimalistic towards human-scaled details, which are important for pedestrian-scaled urbanism. So car culture isn't necessarily modernist, but modernism is inherently anti-urban.

I am making a differentiation here between "modernism" (which I would define as the various forms of geometric sculpturalism, a la Meis and Gehry) and "contemporary" (unabashedly new buildings that accommodate ornament). For example, this building is obviously not historic; it fully embraces contemporary materials and design, but its use of ornament strikes it from the ranks of "modern", IMO.

by BeyondDC on Oct 22, 2008 9:32 am • link • report

Sorry to keep coming back, but one more thing:

>Le Corbusier was an artist.

The problem is that architects aren't supposed to be artists. Artists are only concerned with creating beauty. Architects are concerned with making functional things beautiful, which makes them, like silversmiths, artisans.

The difference is not semantic. Architects who forget that their buildings must function correctly in urban context are not doing the world any favors.

Now, that's not to say there isn't room for purely artist buildings. Some buildings (like the Eiffel Tower or the Bilbao Guggenheim) function as artistic sculpture, and in those cases it's just fine for architects to think of themselves as artists, but those buildings account for maybe 0.001% of what's built. Meanwhile 99% of architects are trained to think of themselves as artists.

by BeyondDC on Oct 22, 2008 9:39 am • link • report

Good argument about architecture. My personal criticism of architecture is that is has long since retreated into its own little world. It seems that more and more architecture is designed to impress other architects, rather than function well in its environment. I find that slightly sad because I like to think that the field has more to offer the world than competitive consumptoin and oneupsmanship.

(For you architects out there, I don't mean to offend. I feel the same way about the academic wing of my field: economics.)

by Cavan on Oct 22, 2008 9:55 am • link • report

>My personal criticism of architecture is that is has long since retreated into its own little world.

I think that's a direct result of modernism, and of the mistaken belief that architecture is art.

Academically, the architectural world is obsessed with geometric sculpture (modernism), and with the neverending quest for new shapes to sculpt (a trait of art). Anything other than geometric sculpture, and any shape that has already been sculpted, is looked down upon.

But the rest of society just wants attractive, contextual buildings in which to live and work. So the rest of society distances itself from modernism.

Meanwhile, having come to believe that the artistic brilliance of the architect mustn't be tainted with functional problems, architects have themselves ceded the work of general contractors and city planners. There was once a time when architects were the great builders of society. Like the emo kid in high school, they gave up the everything else to focus on their art.

by BeyondDC on Oct 22, 2008 10:12 am • link • report

So many things...

The point about car-centered culture is that the ideas of transit that created modernism have roots in society before then. Similarly, the self-centered nature of architectural practice goes back to the Renaissance, and gets to be a tenet in neoclassicism, and is carried in the Beaux-arts. That architects were great builders in the past is an issue related to how much simpler construction was back before the steel frame and the telephone. Architects still explore materials and techniques, but a team of specialized engineers is still necessary in every serious building project to do anything other than 2.5-storey wood frame construction.

BeyondDC: The example you offered as pretentious is not. It's just decorated. The hotel is lazy and greedy. It's true that a lot of builders embraced modern design to justify not paying for ornament, but that's how it goes: hand-carved limestone is expensive. I think the pretension at Bethesda Row Arcade is the same kind of pretension as a McMansion, just with a little better detailing.

I agree that modernism retreated into a sculptural navelgazing, and it is quite frankly a historical fact, not a movement. The Grank Gehry fanclub is the worst thing to happen to architecture since Howard Roark.

BeyondDC, you need to do some reading up, like seriously, if you think that Modernism is all about sculptural expression. It's a mistake that is very American and goes back to the stripping of the socialist ideology off of the Bauhaus. You can't be blamed, because it is a mistake that most architects made in the sixties.

That modernism has too few human-scale details is a point I concede, although that is not always the case, and that notion is changing as we speak.

Also, you say that people want attractive, functional buildings. So do most architects. The starchitects of our day are a dying breed. Even in the upper echelons of high design the newer architects use ornament freely, they just tie it to some rationalist structure. The open secret is that no one believes Loos anymore. The "modern" building you show as new, but ornamental is not the best example.

Lastly, people don't want attractive, functional buildings because they arrived at that conclusion through rational enquiry. I cannot account for taste for your or myself, and I can only say that our ideas of beauty, as well as the ideas of beauty of the general public are heavily influenced by our culture and the things in our life. Think about the embrace of crappy suburban architecture. Brainwashing by the modernist cabal or just people don't always understand good design intuitively?

I once hated modern architecture and was the bad boy in my architecture classes, until I went to Europe and actually saw good prosaic modern buildings. It was revelatory and I never lived down the conversion in school.

But now I'm rambling.

by The King of Spain on Oct 22, 2008 12:52 pm • link • report

King, this is good information to know. I don't have a background in architecture so I don't quite get all the references you made.

It's good to hear that the starchitects are going away and the field is getting more practical. I look forward to seeing more contemporary modern buildings that work well at the human scale.

by Cavan on Oct 22, 2008 2:01 pm • link • report

I grant that modernism isn't supposed to be about sculptural expression. It's tied up in all sorts of ideas about rejecting totalitarianism and embracing functional use of contemporary materials and technology. But you know what? I went to architecture school, I know what's taught there, and I call bullshit.

Architects these days - American architects, at least - are trained to think they're all budding Howard Roarks, but ironically they had better subscribe to establishment ideas about abstraction, else their genius be questioned. The school experience you describe seems to follow suit. Modernism may have had good intentions, and it may even be succeeding in Europe (where the much larger supply of contextual traditional buildings makes the modernist parody of traditionalism more entertaining), but here in America modernism has become little more than an abortion of responsibility on the part of wannabe artists.

You say the current breed of modernists are coming to embrace ornament and human-scaled details. I agree that there is such a movement afoot, and I’m glad for it, but:

1) I reject the idea that such a movement can be called modernist, thus my distinction between "modern" and "contemporary". This building, for example (which I am not judging as either good or bad) is clearly contemporary, but I wouldn't call it modernist. On the contrary, it has features that can only be described as traditional - the top-middle-bottom facade layout, for example. Would you call that a modernist building? If so, why?

2) If there is such a movement, there is an equally strong counter movement. Look at the stock of large buildings constructed over the past 5 years or so and it is readily apparent that boxy, plain glass curtain walls have made a big time comeback. When 1700 K St went up every architecture critic I can think of (outside the urbanist blogosphere) heaped the praise. Post-modernism, which embraces proportion and detail and was once the height of avant-garde, is now scorned among the academics for somehow being "impure", even though the public liked it and continues to like it.

Regarding crappy suburban architecture, I think the embrace of the Toll Brothers faux-Georgian McMansion is illustrative that people want traditional buildings rather than modernist ones, which is to say, human-scaled details rather than abstraction or machine-like simplicity. That we get shitty Toll Brothers rather than attractive bungalows is testament to the architecture profession's inability to step up to the task. If people are filling their residential streets with garish or pretentious chotsky, it's because they want feminine detail and ornament, but can't get it from good designers. Plaster columns from AC Moore are all that’s available.

by BeyondDC on Oct 22, 2008 2:24 pm • link • report

1. Le Corbusier didn't like the term modernism. He viewed what he was doing as timeless, and I agree, because his buildings are art. He was the wrong example to follow.

2. Modernism is a catch-all for a lot of things that were dominated by what we call the International Style. The historical modern movement was once based on the notion that tradition must be stripped down to what is enduring about architecture and put it in a spiritually pure, rationalist aesthetic. This is often too ascetic for daily life, I agree. But the better definition is that ornament is permitted in modern architecture if it is conceptually justified.

3. 1700 K is proportional, has a top, middle, and bottom, and has window details. Is it traditional too? You'd be surprised to see what bauhaus buildings looked like before 1929. Colorful, simple, with massing that was not barracks-like. Mies liked his buildings to have tops and bottoms too.

4. Tradition means things handed down, taking for the past. That includes the lessons of the past as well as the baggage.

5. Postmodernism embraces human detail? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH HAHA HA Ah. Oh my, that was ironic enough for a postmodernist to enjoy. Some of them, indeed. Rob Krier comes to mind. James Sterling? Can you offer an example? Can't say Bob Stern.

6. The current fad for glass buildings is a style thing that I dislike. Some are good, though. But to suggest that that is a trend is to forget that DC is behind the times. Besides, look at all the work that Torti Gallas and DP-Z are getting these days.

7. The notion that people want human-scale detail is not something that I disagree with, but that does not account for why they like traditional buildings, even before the starter castle came into vogue. They are immensely satisfied with obnoxious houses of poor quality because of their own egos. Factually, the notion of what a house looks like is inculcated into people's minds. Go find some preschoolers and ask them what a house looks like.

8. Architects aren't stepping up to the job? Nonsense upon piloti! Cost, Cost, Cost, Cost, Cost. The people who are getting these houses would not have been able to afford houses that were designed by architects in the past. Have yo ever been to a poor neighborhood in Portsmouth? Identical brick slums. If you see those, you'll think Sursum Cora had great architecture.

9. Define feminine beauty and how that can be made into architecture, justifying why male beauty is bad, without pissing off a Women and Gender Studies professor.

by The King of Spain on Oct 22, 2008 3:35 pm • link • report

Why does appreciation for feminine beauty necessitate defining masculine beauty as 'bad'?

by Bianchi on Oct 22, 2008 4:37 pm • link • report

At this point we're picking semantics and talking past each other.

Long story short, can we all agree that ornate details are a good thing in urban architecture, though they are perhaps difficult to do well?

by BeyondDC on Oct 23, 2008 3:48 pm • link • report

ok, I haven't read all the comments above - however, the Carson Pire Scott building in Chicago comes to mind http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/fa267/sullivan/carsonp2.jpg

by Bianchi on Oct 23, 2008 4:00 pm • link • report

"Pirie"

by Bianchi on Oct 23, 2008 4:02 pm • link • report