Feds v. Feds on AFRH

The Federal Government has an enormous impact on the shape of DC through the large number of Federal properties. It represents some of the worst planning and also the best planning at the same time, through different agencies and boards that have very different approaches to design.

The proposed Armed Forces Retirement Home development shows off both the good and the bad. Founded in 1851 to house disabled and homeless war veterans, and used as a getaway by President Lincoln, the Home ran into financial difficulties and decided to sell some of their land at the edge of the property for development. Here is their proposal. Neighbors want the open space preserved, while others want even more urban development. NCPC recently scheduled a neighborhood meeting for April 14th in advance of their May 1 regular meeting where they will review the plan.

The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the other federal board along with NCPC that reviews architecture and urban design, discussed the plan in January. CFA and NCPC usually have been very good in their approach to development, and CFA’s criticisms of the AFRH proposal justified my respect for them. Below are some of the key points of AFRH’s plan, my reaction, and CFA’s objection in architect-ese.

Zone A: “Semi-urban” means what?

Zone A covers 77 acres at the southeast corner of the property, along North Capitol and Irving Streets. This is the largest and proposed to be the most dense. Yet the designers’ suburban sensibility comes out right at the start as they intend the zone “to become a sustainable, walkable community of semi-urban character.” What is “semi-urban”? And in what way is a grid of streets, filled with buildings up to 8 stories tall, and built almost out to the street, semi-urban?

If semi-urban means anything, it’s urban forms that are only semi-well-designed. That describes this section of the plan. (Or as the CFA put it, “The proposal does little to acknowledge the urban context, including a lack of expression of the North Capitol Street axis in the proposed development.”)

What’s good:

• Buildings built out to the street are a good urban design.
• Most of the street alignments point at the grand historic Forwood Building, creating dramatic views along the streets.
• Retail corridors that line up with the roads connecting across North Capitol and Irving, meaning pedestrians (and drivers) coming from CUA or the hospitals will pass the retail.

What’s bad:

Single-use zoning.
• Single-use zoning, discredited since the days of Robert Moses, is in force. The southern half of the site is marked commercial, the northern half residential, instead of a better mix.
• Parking. There’s a huge amount of parking, and no real discussion of TDM (more on that below). The courtyards of the buildings along Irving Street are proposed to be filled with parking garages that front onto Irving. On the other hand, they do require the structures to “not express their use on the outside of the buildings”, and Irving in this area is configured mostly as an expressway, but as the HPRB writes, garages of this type “tend to look like garages nonetheless. It is a good thing that such structures are not oriented toward the interior of the campus (indeed, they take advantage of the grade falling to the south and east), but more care has to be taken to not turn a bunch of parking garages toward the surrounding city either.”
• Lack of a street grid. While aligning the streets with the Forwood Building looks nice, the rest of the streets are a hodgepodge that don’t line up with each other.
• All big buildings. This one is pretty typical of all building projects, but with each block containing 1-2 huge buildings, it won’t get the variety of older areas with more individual buildings.
• Lack of transition. Good design transitions gradually from tall buildings to shorter ones to open space; this plan would create tall buildings across the street from open fields (not urban parkland, which like New York’s Central Park looks nice flanked by tall buildings).

Zone B: Park or retail?

This 8-acre parcel sits on the southwest corner, across the street from the Park View neighborhood and the western end of the Hospital Center. The neighbors, understandably, would prefer open space, as does CFA and HPRB. If development does happen here, this plan has some good features, though some bad ones as well.

What’s good:

• The size of the buildings step down gradually from taller buildings on the east to shorter ones near the rowhouses of Park View.
• Retail directly on Irving Street could serve the hospital center and the neighborhood.

What’s bad:

• This area doesn’t connect to Zone A, or as CFA put it, “the proposed development treats the site as a patchwork of separate parcels rather than presenting a comprehensive vision.”
• Like Zone A, it’s mostly block-sized buildings and a lot of parking, which is unfortunately typical of developments like this.

Zone C: Townhouses without a grid

Zone C seems to be everyone’s least favorite. HPRB feels quite strongly that it should not be developed.

Putting that aside, though, it also looks like the architect just came from designing an over-55 country club in Florida. Immediately next to a neighborhood of townhouses arranged in a traditional grid, this area sticks with the townhouses but arranges them in arcs and lines with no connectivity except through one main street, and a barrier separates them from the adjacent neighborhood. CFA also objected, calling this an “inappropriately suburban treatment of the residential buildings,” and argued that “the plan should relate to the adjacent neighborhood’s urban pattern and scale to generate the layout of the proposed residential buildings.”

Transportation Management “Plan”

Since they are required to have a transportation management plan, they have one, which mostly amounts to “we’ll have one later.” The document encourages carpooling and promises a shuttle to Metro, but will also have so much parking (almost 6,500 spaces) and one per residential unit that this development will certainly increase vehicle trips. I’ve seen and heard reference to a “strongly worded letter” from DDOT about the transportation impacts, and am trying to get a copy.

What’s next

NCPC is the next agency to discuss this project. They are holding a neighborhood meeting in Columbia Heights on April 14th, and then discussing the plan at their regular meeting on May 1.