Posts about McMillan Two

Transportation

The McMillan Two plan includes several implicit transportation initiatives. Most notably, the plan calls for the full removal of the freeways flanking the Anacostia - both the Southeast/Southwest and Anacostia freeways. Nir Buras notes that streetcars could be added to the plan, as his plan continues the framework of the L'Enfant grid and radial avenues, maintaining the wide rights of way that could be amenable to streetcars. However, any other discussion of transportation is strangely absent from the plan.

While the L'Enfant plan laid out the skeleton to the city and the McMillan plan made Washington into the City Beautiful, the element that's added (or re-added) the meat to the city's bones over the past 30+ years has been Metro. Metro has shaped suburbs and provided a mechanism for repopulating downtown.

Similarly scaled projects and plans around the world all feature substantial investments in transit infrastructure. Both Canary Wharf in London's Docklands and La Défense in Paris feature large transit investments. Nir Buras might not like the form of these developments, but they fit the scope of McMillan Two. In London, Canary Wharf features both the Jubilee Line extension while also serving as the hub for the massive investment of the Docklands Light Railway.

London's Docklands. Image from Google Maps.

Similarly, La Défense includes an extension of the Paris Metro line 1, while also serving as the terminus to the T2 tramway, as well as a stop along RER A.

Currently, the area along the Anacostia includes a couple of Metro stations in the vicinity, but if these new areas are to serve large new developments, they need infrastructure to support that growth - beyond just streets and bridges. Even without McMillan Two's narrowing of the Anacostia, transportation investments will be necessary for redevelopments in Poplar Point, the River Terrace power plant, and Buzzard Point. These could be McMillan Two's numerous bridges across the Anacostia, with or without the narrowed river channel. Still, that framework is only one part of the equation - imagine what DC could do with a transit investment in the area on the scale of the DLR.

Green Infrastructure

By building off the principles of the McMillan Plan, McMillan Two is also building off the principles of the City Beautiful movement. The City Beautiful asserted that grand, monumental spaces could foster moral and civic virtue amongst residents, and that a harmonious physical order would promote a similarly harmonious social order.

The track record for meeting these lofty goals is inconclusive at best, but the City Beautiful certainly left Washington and other places with many practical (and beautiful) enhancements. Beautification efforts also tackled basic problems of infrastructure - sewers and utilities, sidewalks and streetscapes. The common critique of the City Beautiful is that it is solely an aesthetic treatment for planning, yet many of its basic elements functioned quite well and continue to do so today.

McMillan Two appeals to the beautiful elements of that tradition, but it lacks the functionality. Combined with the serious ecological concerns about narrowing the Anacostia, the functional elements of the plan seem to be in short supply.

However, the plan provides an opportunity, as well. One impetus for the plan (as well as Buras' selection of Paris as his case study) is DC's currently poor relationship with the water. DC urban waterfronts are in short supply, with only small stretches along Maine Ave SW, Georgetown, and Old Town Alexandria providing places where the city meets the water. Likewise, concerns over ecology and the Anacostia's hydrology ought to be far more prominent in the McMillan Two agenda.

Streetside bioswale, Seattle. Image from Wikimedia.

Together, these elements represent the opportunity to make this plan as the large scale, urban application of green infrastructure. During his interview on the Kojo Nnamdi show, Buras rightly points out that the Anacostia today is in no way a natural river. However, we can do both.

Permeable pavings, bioswales, and other sustainable urban drainage systems can mimic natural marshes and ecosystems while still connecting the city to the waterfront. To date, most of these applications focus on small-scale projects, but this plan provides the opportunity for a large scale application. Furthermore, most of these drainage systems mimic natural ponds and marshes, and take their visual cues from those influences. This provides a chance to implement such systems in both an urban environment and in an urban design. How can stormwater detention and infiltration areas be effective public, urban spaces?

Like the transportation elements, use of this infrastructure is not predicated on narrowing the river. It can be applied to any plan, and would hopefully become part of the best practices across the city.

Implementation

The single greatest aspect of the McMillan Two plan is its breadth of vision and scope. Such breadth is also a challenge. Both the L'Enfant and McMillan plans featured a grand vision and scope, but they were also easily broken up into manageable chunks, making implementation easy. L'Enfant's street grid took decades to build out, but surveying streets is a relatively easy task. McMillan's monuments and public spaces evolved over the course of several decades as well.

McMillan Two's big move, narrowing the Anacostia, cannot easily be broken up into chunks (if it can be done at all in good environmental conscience). For a plan with a scope of 100 years, you also need an implementation plan.

Potentially, it's possible to meet all of McMillan Two's goals without actually narrowing the river. If you were to combine base re-alingment (as the plan displaces the Navy Yard, Bolling AFB and the Anacostia Naval Air Station) with the construction of new bridges, but without the narrowing of the river, you'd still have a large area to redevelop according to the plan without the hydrologic hurdles.

Public Input

Neil's inital post on the subject generated quite a few comments. This kind of plan requires public support, and gaining that support requires input from stakeholders through mediums like this. Comments and criticism will make this a stronger plan. My personal initial reactions to the plan have shaped my view of it, but only through a robust dialogue will the plan evolve beyond just the ideas of Mr. Buras and into a true civic vision for Washington DC.

Cross-posted at City Block.

The keystone of the plan is a narrowed Anacostia, slimmed by half to the Seine's width of around 500 feet. And just as at the Seine, fourteen-foot-tall stone embankments would allow streets to pass over the river at grade, with street level above potential floods. Away from the river, McMillan Two calls for the elimination – or at least burial – of all freeways and rail lines south of the Mall that disconnect River East from the Federal City. In place of these marginal spaces, marshlands, and rivers of concrete, the grid would extend out onto reclaimed land. The new real estate would allow for the construction of thousands of new apartments and offices without directly displacing any individuals. Passing through lots and streets, new avenues would meet at open squares for future monuments after the style of L'Enfant and Haussmann.

Area around East Capitol Street now (left) and proposed (right).

The largest public area would be a vast basin just north of what is now Poplar Point that would serve as a plaza with around water. Upstream, East Capitol Street would cross over an island modeled on Île de la Cité with the Blue and Orange Lines underground. At the southern end of the project, a gateway of two large pillars on quays would visually separate the Potomac from its tributary.

Most buildings would stand six to eight stories tall, with the last two minimized behind a sloped roof. Large tree-lined promenades (Buras believes DC can improve on Paris by adding more trees) would pass throughout the reclaimed area, with particularly verdant ones running along the upper level of the embankment. Spaces created in the embankment promenades would house boat clubs, restaurants accessible from a lower-level embankment. Alternatively, infrastructure such as a Chicago-style service road or commuter rail might fill in the space made by raising the ground level, but again, there is flexibility.

Left: Section of the proposed embankment. Right: Seine embankment by cuellar on Flickr.

Additionally, the plan would improve the street infrastructure while also lessening the dominance of automobiles. The new avenues and side streets would support well more than the current freeways carry and pass over more bridges. An admirer of Hans Monderman, Buras emphasizes the importance of intuitive roads and shared space, citing the George Washington Parkway as a local example of both. In terms of transit infrastructure, Streetcars could also be added as needed, along with bus facilities, but Build DC have deliberately left transportation plans loose, open to long-term change.

This intentional vagueness contrasts with the programmatic specificity in the NCPC's 1997 Extending the Legacy plan and Comprehensive Plan program. These current successors to the McMillan Plan focus on adding large new public spaces for monuments. Because it sticks primarily to the grid and avenues, the McMillan Two Design appears much less grandiose, but also less green. For example, NCPC calls for East Capitol Street to pass under at an East Mall and then over the Anacostia. The McMillan Two plan would restore the boulevard straight across, with no new parkland. Considering the constant use of the athletic fields around the Mall, retaining the same acreage of useable parkland, or even increasing it, would be wise even if it departs from L'Enfant's vision. The Frenchman's genius notwithstanding, the outdoors interests of city dwellers have changed significantly from 1790 and even 1902. Accommodating more active recreation, uses that require substantial space, will enhance the quality of life of residents. Adding a few hundred thousand people while reducing recreation space would diminish the quality of city life and make urbanism less appealing to potential residents.

Of course, the trope is that the French don't exercise too much – so if people will soon be living in Point Peuplier, perhaps lifestyles will change as much as the built environment. But Paris is different than DC in many ways as well. Most importantly, the Seine had a similar, but not identical character. Until the 1700s, the Seine was a very small river except during rainfall, surrounded by mudflats and wetlands. The Anacostia, even in its current state is 1000 feet wide without any rain, even if it's very shallow in most parts. And even when builders channelized the Seine, its course was not as abstracted as the McMillan Two plan calls for. More generally, Washington's geology and climate do not totally resemble Paris's, and a respect for these characteristics of a region should be visible in a city based on the genius of place. In Paris and most of France, limestone is a local material and weather is more temperate; in DC, that material is brick and the humidity can be oppressive. The latter two differences are minor, so Buras argues that the form and style could be appropriately adapted to local needs.

However, Build DC needs to resolve several contentious issues before matters of style come up. First, they must clearly defend the need for such a bold, expensive undertaking. Currently, the area in question lacks important infrastructure, while other, unremarkable areas have access to those resources, but are themselves underdeveloped. Secondly, they need to prove that the environmental effects of eliminating wetlands and narrowing the channel will not adversely affect the river ecosystem or cause further innundation. The elimination of marshes and channelization in other cities has led to serious flooding and dangerous river conditions. Build DC needs to demonstrate that a scheme that remediates the habitat and adds density elsewhere would not work as well. As a secondary question, the known level of dioxin pollution in Anacostia sediment calls into question whether the dredged material could even be used for fill without risking serious contamination. Lastly, they need to settle the means of financing for such a project. Presently, the scheme calls for sale of townhouse-sized lots and the distribution of some lots to residents of Anacostia or other underprivileged groups. But the specifics are not yet set in stone, and Buras freely acknowledges this, even as he anticipates civic generosity from Congress.

Proposed Naval Museum on the Washington Channel.

That financial and political support will need to appear before any new Classical plan begins to guide the future of Washington. In regard to its lack of formal approval, the McMillan Two plan resembles the 1909 Plan of Chicago. Brought to the public realm by private figures, the Burnham Plan still guided planners and politicians. Some of the iconic structures never saw completion, but the beautiful parks along Lake Michigan, the transit infrastructure improvements, and the many bridges over the river would not have happened had Burnham and Bennett made only little plans. Unsurprisingly, Build DC is taking a long perspective for completion, one hundred years at least to really see major construction. But for now, the best thing to do with these plans is to debate them. The beauty of unsolicited architecture is that it encourages others react and form ideas in dialogue, so people have some centering when trying to imagine the future. McMillan Two is one such provocation, with brilliant and sound elements along side questionable and uncertain problems. What the region makes of it will depend on a serious consideration of its merits in public debate.

Cross-posted at цarьchitect.