Posts about Architecture

"The first iteration is almost always horrible," said Harriet Tregoning, DC's planning director. Tregoning argued that communities need to be constantly vigilant and to push back through review and input.

An example of a federal building with negative impact is the FBI Building in downtown Washington. When asked if they thought it was "the worst building in DC," a significant portion of the audience raised their hands. Foreboding and removed from the street, this building serves as an example of what not to do.

On the other hand, the sheer number of workers a new federal office brings into an area can activate the neighborhood. This activity can spur more growth and create new urban fabric where there previously was none. They can give birth to entirely new neighborhoods, or revive ones long since written off.

Qualities of many federal facilities pose problems

Federal office buildings are inherently single-use. Office workers do little for neighborhoods after business hours. This can be especially damaging when agencies cluster, creating large single-use neighborhoods. By spreading offices throughout the region, federal projects can invigorate many different neighborhoods instead of negatively affecting just a handful.

Federal buildings farther from transit often use shuttle buses. These could also provide a desirable transit option for neighborhood residents, but security rules often bar them from riding. This has been part of the conversation around the Department of Homeland Security's new offices at the former St. Elizabeth's hospital site between Anacostia and Congress Heights.

Individual buildings can do a lot to help or hurt their neighborhood. The parking garage for the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) in Alexandria is lined with townhouses on two sides, but other sides are just screened and set back from the street with landscaping, creating a dead streetscape. Many projects fall into this same pattern, with a mix of successful and unsuccessful components.

Security drives many design decisions and harms communities

The General Services Administration (GSA) is working to reverse damage to the streetscape from its massive headquarters in Foggy Bottom. The building is currently entirely disconnected from the street, but GSA plans to bring retail back to the building's street frontage.

To do this, they had to get creative with a factor that hampers the design of many federal projects, security. Security drives a lot of design decisions for federal projects.

For example, the US Department of Transportation's building in the District's Navy Yard neighborhood takes up two entire city blocks, but has only one retail space along its entire façade, a Starbucks. It brings many workers to the area, but does little for the street.

In urban conditions, security hurts the streetscape by restricting building access from the street and for­bidding retail from lining the outside of buildings. In more suburban conditions it creates large campuses, cut off from what little grid there is and keeping workers from being able to activate the area around them. These large campuses also restrict the ability for planners to attempt to reconnect neighborhoods.

By adapting, many agencies are tackling these issues. The GSA's headquarters was formerly a Level 5 security building. In its renovation, they created a graduated security system, where not all areas of the buildings require the maximum security. As a result, almost all the security bollards around the building could be removed, a marked improvement to pedestrian conditions.

The lower level of security makes street level retail a possibility, and the GSA is looking into opening the building's cafeteria to the public, allowing the agency to share this amenity with their neighborhood.

Sustainability goes beyond LEED

Federal buildings built today have more environmentally-friendly design features. This demonstrates leadership and forward thinking from GSA and the agencies, but Rollin Stanley, Director of Planning for Montgomery County, was careful to remind the audience that the greenest building is the one that already exists, and urged federal designers not get too caught up in LEED.

A LEED Platinum building with no transit options but hundreds of free parking spaces will do more harm to the environment that a building built to lower environmental standards. There are many different factors to take into account to judge a building's true impact on the environment.

Many federal buildings, like many private buildings, are building more parking spots than they need to. Federal agencies are often surprised by how many workers will choose to commute in ways besides driving. At the Mark Center in Alexandria, offices for the Department of Defense were expected to produce massive gridlock. Instead, 50% of workers utilize transit to get to the site.

Little touches can do a lot

With creative designs, federal buildings can often make the most out of restrictions out of their control. The PTO's work in Alexandria requires constant delivery of packages between offices, so the hallways were placed facing the street. This allowed workers to make deliveries by daylight and activate the streetscape. The building could not have retail, but the PTO activated the street in a unique way.

Small-scale gestures have very positive effects on the areas around government offices. The PTO provides Wi-Fi in a small park adjacent to the offices and installed glass columns that light at night. Despite larger urban design failings, small gestures like these can make a big difference in neighborhoods.

Federal projects have their own strengths and weaknesses, but each gains from the collective knowledge of the projects that have come before. Agencies are generally moving towards better designed buildings, closer to transit, that give workers more flexibility. We will surely witness missteps along the way, but the trajectory for these buildings and the positive change they can bring to the areas is promising.

The residential component comes in three parts:

A 20-story apartment tower with studio, one-bedroom, and two-bedroom units. Home Properties claims it will be the tallest building in Silver Spring, but at 200 feet tall, it's actually just the tallest apartment tower, because there are four taller office buildings in downtown Silver Spring. The tallest building in Montgomery County, meanwhile, will be this 300 foot tall apartment tower in White Flint.

Not everyone will love the sleek, modern design, though one of the commenters on the Just Up the Pike Facebook page called it a "watered-down" version of The Standard Hotel in New York, which is encouraging.

The long strip windows are an interesting break from the typical window-balcony-window rhythm of many residential buildings. It's not totally clear from these images what materials will be used on the building's exterior, but it looks comparable to the metal cladding used on Cityline, a building Shalom Baranes designed in Tenleytown.

At the tower's base will be 7 row houses with rooftop decks. This is a variation of the "Vancouver point tower," which is basically an apartment tower with townhouses on the bottom. It kills two birds with one stone, providing the density of a high-rise building above while creating a low-rise, human-scaled experience at the street level.

Not only does this put people on the sidewalks, but it gives them something interesting to look at, not just driveways like some other downtown Silver Spring buildings.

A 5-story "loft-style" building with apartments and retail space. The Planning Department says this building will be about 80 feet high, suggesting that there will be some nice, tall ceilings inside. I'm not sure if storefront retail would be successful here, as it's currently a little off the beaten path. Improving the site's connections to the surrounding area will be important.

That's why the project also includes an extension of Dixon Avenue, which currently ends a block north at Bonifant Street. Home Properties will build the portion of the new street that passes through their site. Eventually, Dixon Avenue will continue south to Silver Spring Avenue.

Along with another new street connecting Ripley and Bonifant, Dixon Avenue will connect Eleven55 to the Metro and the rest of downtown Silver Spring. This will require tearing out part of the massive public parking garage on Bonifant or removing it completely, which may not happen for a long time.

Finally, the developer will build a quarter-acre pocket park at the with public art commemorating the life and works of environmentalist Rachel Carson, who wrote the book Silent Spring from her house in nearby White Oak.

Many of downtown Silver Spring's pocket parks are poorly designed and seldom used, but this one looks pretty good. For starters, placing it at the end of the block allows the new buildings to cozy up to the sidewalk, exactly as buildings in urban neighborhoods are supposed to do.

It's hard to imagine it today, but one day this park will be surrounded by a new Silver Spring Transit Center, several new buildings, and a partially elevated Purple Line. It'll be a valuable green oasis in the midst of the city, ensuring that people will want to use it.

Eleven55 isn't the only cool new building going up in the Ripley District. The Solaire apartments, being built across the street, will have live-work apartments that allow residents to run small businesses from home. At Ripley and Georgia Avenue is the new headquarters of translation company ALC, which placed a striking modern addition above a 1920's-era shop building.

The Ripley District may be a "made-up" neighborhood, but it's shaping up to be a pretty nice place. It's encouraging to see that architects and developers alike are beginning to embrace good urbanism, rather than settling for suburban-style buildings with huge driveways, as was once proposed for this site. Hopefully, Eleven55 will set the standard for new construction in downtown Silver Spring.

The proposed skyscraper is part of a massive mixed-use transit oriented development planned for across the street from White Flint Metro. Called North Bethesda Market II, the building will have 345 residential units and measure about 300 feet tall. While the residential tower will anchor the development, the plan as a whole also includes a 175,000 square foot office building and 115,000 square feet of retail space.

Putting skyscrapers in White Flint makes sense. White Flint is Montgomery County's version of Tysons Corner: a huge collection of dense but mostly suburban office buildings and residential high rises. With its Metro station, the area is as perfect a location for smart growth development as there could be in Montgomery County.

The project site plan shows that like the existing North Bethesda Market I, the North Bethesda Market II proposal is basically urban. The public spaces turn their back on Rockville Pike, which is unfortunate, but the urban design is still a big step up from existing conditions.

And then there's the architecture. The bold, modernist ziggurat is absolutely unlike anything else in our region. It is a shocking sculptural statement that succeeds in all the ways it is meant to. It's not the kind of architecture that would make a good city if repeated over 10,000 background buildings, but it will be an undeniable landmark - an icon to the city White Flint aspires to be.

I wouldn't want to see more than one of these, but I like it for what it is.

Mario and Pauline Scandiffio were just the kind of buyers Garden Homes, Inc., wanted to move into Northwood Park. In 1939 Mario Scandiffio (1902-1996) was a Washington pediatrician who was gaining national prominence in a growing battle over the new field of managed healthcare. His wife, Pauline (1903-1989), was a singer and radio personality who also worked as a Bureau of Engraving tour guide.

After spending the first nine years of their marriage living in a Washington apartment, the Scandiffios wanted a home in the suburbs near Dr. Scandiffio's new Silver Spring medical office; Mrs. Scandiffio, an avid golfer, wanted to live near the Indian Spring Country Club. The Northwood Park subdivision and the Scandiffios were a perfect fit when in August of 1939 a Washington Post photographer captured the image of Mrs. Scandiffio taking the key to the couple's new house: Washington's New York World's Fair Home.

Platted in early 1936, Northwood Park quickly sprouted single-family homes marketed to young professionals like the Scandiffios. Using common real estate trade tools, Garden Homes lured prospective buyers through creatively illustrated and worded display ads hawking Northwood Park's rustic charm, affordability, and proximity to Washington.

The firm used themed models like the Bachelor Girl Home and the Bride's Home, which were fully furnished and equipped with the latest modern gas appliances. Some of these model homes came with a brand new car in the garage and a supply of groceries.

For three years Northwood Park's marketing efforts shared affinities with subdivisions throughout Montgomery County and the nation. Then, in February 1939, in anticipation of the spring sales campaign to sell off its remaining properties, Garden Homes set out to capitalize on the growing publicity surrounding the opening of the World's Fair later that May.

The developers saw a unique intersection between their efforts to sell suburban homes and the 1939 World's Fair's mission to sell dreams of modern convenience and technological wonder to Americans visiting the fair as well as those experiencing it through the media.

For much of the nineteenth century, the parcels that ultimately became Northwood Park were part of a 56-acre farm between the road linking Four Corners with Wheaton and the Ashton and Coleville Turnpike, now the congested University Boulevard and Colesville Road intersection.

Louise Vonne, a Washington, DC subdivider, in late 1935 bought 28 acres carved out of the original farmland. She quickly had the property surveyed and filed a subdivision plat for "Northwood Park" one month after the purchase. The new subdivision had 93 lots, most of which had 70-foot frontages on one of six streets dissecting the property. After holding the property for less than half a year, Vonne sold it to Waldo M. Ward.

While the nation remained mired in economic depression, Washington and its suburbs experienced phenomenal growth fueled by a growing federal workforce and subsidized by easy credit guaranteed by the new Federal Housing Administration. Single- and multi-family developments sprouted in the County's more urbanized areas as well as in outlying rural communities that became increasingly more accessible and appealing as the automobile began to dominate our transportation network. Montgomery County-based developers competed with Washington-based speculators for prime real estate. Vonne and Ward were minor subdivider-developers compared to Morris Cafritz, E. Brooke Lee, and others who reworked the landscape on a large scale.

Waldo Ward (1885-1959) began his professional life in Washington selling automobile and fire insurance. In the early 1920s he founded the Union Finance Company and began developing residential properties throughout the District of Columbia. Ward's Washington developments included rowhouses in Holbrook Street Northeast and in Madison Terrace Northwest. Ward also owned, built, and sold houses in Southeast's Fairlawn neighborhood. By 1935 he was developing and selling properties in Montgomery County's Huntington Terrace subdivision.

James A. Wilson, a former civil engineer turned salesman, became Ward's selling agent. In business together for at least a year, Wilson and Ward set their sights on a joint venture north of Silver Spring near Four Corners. On 25 June 1936 Ward bought Vonne's Northwood Park subdivision and Wilson bought 14.3 acres adjoining Northwood Park to the south. Ads touting Northwood Park's homes began appearing in the Washington Post in July of 1936, one month after the sale of the subdivision's first home. Garden Homes, Inc., was created as the entity to develop and sell the subdivision for Ward.

Garden Homes marketed Northwood Park as a "Woodland Community" with "individually designed, moderately priced homes … [in] a location in the very heart of nature, guarded by protective restrictions."

The location, just north of established Silver Spring subdivisions along one of Montgomery County's five major transportation corridors and less than half a mile from the Indian Spring Country Club, was ideal. A 1939 building industry article noted that builders could effectively sell homes using advertising campaigns that turned on one of several themes: "large wooded building sites … an exclusive neighborhood … closeness to good transportation … [or] a low price for that classification of house."

Ward, who owned the largest number of parcels with the original Northwood Park subdivision, was the partner with the most assets and he moved to protect them as the young subdivision began to take off. Two days after Garden Homes filed its articles of incorporation, restrictive covenants were recorded in Montgomery County Land Records. The covenants limited buildings to single-family houses and a garage; limited the subdivision of lots; established seven-foot side- and rear-yard setbacks; set $3,500 as the minimum cost for houses; prohibited nuisance trades; and, restricted non-whites—"any persons of a race whose death rate is at a higher rate than that of the White or Caucasian race"—from buying or renting property in the subdivision.

The Washington Post reported, "Established restrictions and personally supervised sales have resulted in a fine community." Signatories to the covenants included all of the parties who bought into the subdivision in the preceding five months. By filing the covenants with the Recorder of Deeds, Northwood Park's owners obviated reproducing them in individual instruments. Subsequent deeds executed among Ward and new buyers specifically referenced the 25 November 1936, covenants or contained the clause, "subject to covenants of record." Although restrictive covenants typically were associated with Montgomery County's larger and more affluent suburbs, their use with lower-middle-class homebuyers was common throughout the nation.

Ward let Garden Homes take the lead on developing and selling Northwood Park. Most of the original 93 lots were sold by March of 1937. As the year's building campaign began that spring Garden Homes surfaced all of Northwood Park's streets. Ads running in May of 1937 in the Washington Post boasted that 21 homes had been built and occupied and six others were completed and open to potential buyers. Ten houses were under construction and another five sites were under contract for construction.

Throughout 1937 Garden Homes used the Washington Post as its primary selling tool. Display ads run throughout the year carried photos of the new homes and copy targeting middle class homebuyers offering "a sane, safe price range": $6,500 to $9,750. Although the subdivision's natural amenities and convenient location defined Garden Homes' earliest marketing efforts, they failed to distinguish Northwood Park from its neighbors.

In 1938 Garden Homes changed its merchandising strategy. From the outset, the company bet on using model homes and marketing that relied on a symbiotic relationship between the developer and a newspaper hungry for advertising dollars. This was routine in the real estate business and Nelle Wilson, James' wife, deftly managed all of Garden Homes' advertising campaigns. She found creative new ways to sell the company's homes as the firm's "publicity director." Builders and developers had long recognized that local and national news events made good publicity coattails to ride and the 1939 World's Fair seems to have been custom made for Garden Homes.

The New York World's Fair Corporation divided its show into multiple divisions which in turn had several stages keyed to themed focal exhibits in seven interest zones. The Town of Tomorrow was a spurious cul-de-sac located north of the iconic Perisphere and Trylon. The Town of Tomorrow's fifteen demonstration homes had twelve single-family homes that relied on historical stylistic vocabularies and three modernistic homes. All of the homes recapitulated the Fair's embedded theme of looking forward with an eye on the past.

Fair planners viewed domestic architecture as a product. To them, "a home was not just a house. It was the demonstration of the impact of technology on the most mundane aspects of human behavior." Families were not groups of related people; they were consumer units and all of the most familiar American brands, from Heinz and Coca Cola to General Electric, RCA, and Westinghouse, were there to reach consumers.

Each of the Town of Tomorrow's demonstration homes had several corporate sponsors. These were companies who made the appliances inside the home, the utilities that connected it to the outside world, the stores that provided the furnishings, and the various building industry entities who supplied the designs and materials for each home.

Sponsored by the Johns-Manville Company, Demonstration Home No. 15's official name was the Johns-Manville Triple-Insulated House. Described in Fair marketing literature as a "Long Island Colonial Home," House No. 15 was aptly described by its architects as a fusion of Colonial architectural vocabulary with all of the modern conveniences—the latest household appliances—including air conditioning— new building materials, and innovative internal spaces—designed to appeal to contemporary homebuyers.

Home No. 15 was one of three demonstration houses the Fair contracted with the New York City firm Godwin, Thompson & Patterson to design for $3,500. The Johns-Manville house was a one-and-a-half-story T-plan cottage with a symmetrical front façade and interior center chimney. Johns-Manville asbestos shingles clad the exterior walls and roof, except the gable ends; the gable ends were whitewashed brick veneer attached to hollow concrete blocks.

The $9,500 Johns-Manville house was co-sponsored by the American Gas Association as an "all gas house." Appliances included a Servel Electrolux refrigerator and a Magic Chef Gas Range. Heated by a Crane Co. system and cooled by a Janitrol air-conditioner, the interior included a finished basement, a first floor with a kitchen, dining room, living room, workshop, maid's room, and a bathroom. The second story had three bedrooms and two bathrooms. The house could be entered through the front door, a side door into the kitchen, or through the rear attached garage. Singled out by the media as one of the most desirable homes in the Town of Tomorrow, the house was featured on the cover of the June 1939 issue of American Builder and Building Age and it was illustrated in McCall's magazine as well as in the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Northwood Park had been touting all-gas homes since its first marketing campaigns in the summer of 1936. In 1938, for example, the company marketed its "Second Anniversary Home" which was equipped with "Every Available Modern Gas Home Appliance." James Wilson appears to have forged a strong relationship with the American Gas Association's Frank Williams. At Williams' suggestion, Wilson in February 1936 wrote to Edward Wilke, director of the Fair's Shelter Exhibits, asking for permission to construct a "duplication of house number 15 in the Town of Tomorrow" in Northwood Park just south of what is now the intersection of Lorain Avenue and Sutherland Road. Fair officials quickly replied with their conditions for licensing the Fair's name and Home No. 15. The conditions required, "that the plans and specifications used by the Fair Corporation in the construction of House No. 15 of the Town of Tomorrow will be followed exactly" and that Garden Homes retain the original architects, Godwin, Thompson, and Patterson:

The architects will be given credit for the design of this house and that they will be compensated for the use of these plans. This compensation would be around $100 although this is a matter that would have to be worked out between you and the architects.

After selling the Fair Corporation on the idea, the clock began ticking on Garden Homes' carefully crafted marketing campaign which was strategically timed to coincide with the Fair's grand opening at the end of April 1939. Nelle Wilson quickly stepped in to take over all communications about the project, and worked relentlessly to secure logos, brochures, and other information to link the Garden Homes enterprise as closely as possible with the Fair.

Garden Homes staged a ceremonial groundbreaking for April 7, 1939. Over the next three months the Washington Post published articles documenting the progress on the house, all in keeping with real estate marketing best practices to place articles in newspapers at various stages of construction. When the house was completed in July 1939, Garden Homes hosted another event that included a parade from downtown Silver Spring and up Colesville Road ending at the World's Fair Home. The 14 July 1939 dedication included a speech by Maryland's secretary of state followed by a private cocktail party for local, state, and federal officials as well as the project's various corporate sponsors.

The home remained open to the public throughout July and into August of 1939. According to the Washington Post, about 4,500 people visited the first day of public viewing. By the end of the publicity campaign more than 27,000 people had visited the home and Northwood Park. On August 13, 1939, Garden Homes held its last public event at the home when James Wilson gave the house's key to new owners: Dr. Mario and Pauline Scandiffio.

The Scandiffios paid for the house with the help of a nine thousand dollar mortgage from First Federal Savings and Loan Association. Over the course of the next dozen years the Scandiffios raised their son and daughter in the home. Daughter Ann Scandiffio recalls walking to nearby St. Bernadette's Catholic School and playing with other children in the neighborhood. The Scandiffio home had an African American live-in housekeeper, Lucille—the kids called her "Sha." Parties were held in the finished basement and Mrs. Scandiffio documented the family's life in the home with her Crown Graphic camera, developing the photos in the room designed as a workshop.

The Scandiffios lived the suburban ideal until 1952 when Dr. Scandiffio sold his practice and moved the family to Florida. Ads for the home's sale in the Washington Post noted that it was "Washington's Official New York World's Fair Home of 1939." John L. and John C. Kirby, along with their wives, bought the home in June of 1952. More than fifty years later, the home remains in the Kirby family.

Northwood Park's World's Fair Home was built at the intersection of corporate consumer culture and vernacular entrepreneurialism. The four-month campaign was Northwood Park and Garden Homes' last. With most of its lots and homes sold, Garden Homes, at its November 1939 board of directors meeting, voted to dissolve the company. It ceased to exist on April 18, 1940. Three days later the Washington Post ran an ad placed by James Wilson offering for sale the remaining 30 lots "in a well established million dollar residential suburb."

The subdivision's birth and growth were not unlike subdivisions built throughout the United States between the World Wars. Garden Homes relied on established real estate marketing techniques to sell its lots and homes. As its principals moved farther away from their initial partner and majority landowner Waldo Ward they developed seasonal marketing campaigns that began to set them apart from competitors in suburban Washington and throughout the nation.

Garden Homes effectively sold the suburban ideal by reaching beyond convention. Garden Homes in its finale pulled off a feat recognized by the leading consumer hucksters of their time as a sublime publicity stunt.

I'll be presenting this and more of the history at the November 2 lecture, 7:00 pm at the George Washington University's Media and Public Affairs Building, Room 309, 805 21st Street NW. Reservations are not required. It costs $10.00 for Latrobe Chapter members, student members (full time) free with ID, $18.00 for non-members.

"Solar Roofpod" may not be winning in the Solar Decathlon's ratings, but the inventive design has sparked plenty of talk about the feasibility of its premise. At less than 800 square feet, the home resembles in size many Manhattan apartments, but claims to reduce utility expenses by $2,500 annually by generating 11.6 megawatt hours of electricity per year through its solar panel system.

Situated on a rooftop, the home has direct access to light, wind, and water, which the team claims will help reduce overall energy costs in conjunction with the energy-conserving design. The module doesn't neglect to take its "host building" into account either: a steel beam Dunnage Garden built around the home helps protect the building below from absorbing the pod's radiation, and provides space for a rooftop garden.

Despite Team New York's obvious ingenuity, its current standing at number 18 out of 19 participating teams doesn't bode well for the potential feasibility of the project on a larger scale.

Although not all of the ten judging metrics have been scored yet, TNY did not fare well on Affordability, coming in second to last with a rating of 61.4 out of 100 possible points. Affordability is an extremely significant metric in this contest, as the Decathlon touts "cost-effective, energy-efficient, and attractive" home design ideas. Though, perhaps unsurprisingly, the judges' dismal score hasn't hurt the public's impression of the Solar Roofpod. Team New York is currently in second place in the People's Choice Awards, in which the public votes on their favorite house.

From an urban planning perspective, the Solar Roofpod offers a space-conscious solution for building new single-family units in an already fully-developed neighborhood and promotes greater use of solar photovoltaic panels and rooftop gardens. There may not be much room in New York's densely packed streets to build new detached townhouses, but there's certainly open space available on top of its existing buildings to give an individual, or perhaps a couple, room to stretch out.

Solar Roofpod's popularity seems to indicate willingness on the part of Americans to suspend their disbelief and imagine what a city like New York might look like if, on top of large office and apartment buildings, one might be able to look up and see a diminutive home. But because of its shortcomings in practicality and livability—Team New York came in dead last in the Comfort category earlier this week—the idea may fade into the sunset once the Decathlon ends.

To understand what I mean by interpretation, take a look at Machado & Silvetti's renovation of the Getty Villa. They combined the pragmatic need for an an entry stairway with architectural promenade that helps visitors understand the museum's curatorial approach.

Treating the 1970s replica of a roman villa as an object in a collection, stairs and pathways frame the building in a sequence that calls to mind an excavation. The stair gives visitors a lens with which to understand the building and clears their minds of the drive out to Malibu.

At Tenleytown, the preservation aspect should have the same approach. Rather than preserving the front of the campus as slice of DC's rural history, any new buildings should frame the old buildings in a way that heightens one's awareness of the area's history, which dates back to the tobacco plantations and and dirt farmers who worked the land before the streetcar suburbs.

By at least 1820, Dunblane House stood on the site, connected to what was then called Georgetown Pike by a long perpendicular driveway. In 1902, when the Sisters of Providence purchased the property for a women's college (Immaculata), they constructed Capital Hall and a chapel over that driveway.

Then, when the city was carving out Nebraska Avenue in the early 20th century, they designed it to intersect Wisconsin Avenue at the same spot where the Dunblane axis ends. Now, from the Dunblane site to Tenley Circle, we have a series of related buildings with a lot of history. But those buildings feel disconnected from the neighborhood.

A good redesign of the campus would link the neighborhood to the campus without diminishing the historic structures.In most projects, architects contrast new work through a difference of style. Here, the architects have an unequaled opportunity to explore the difference through urban design strategies.

Capital Hall is oriented towards Wisconsin Avenue, but it's hard to see the connection to Wisconsin Avenue for two reasons. The first is the lawn in front of the building, which distances Capital hall from its focus. The second is that none of the adjacent buildings are on the same axis. The residences on Nebraska are face that thoroughfare, while St. Anne's Church and the old convent on Yuma Street are aligned north-south on the city's grid.

I propose that the most effective way to contextualize the historic buildings is to heighten the sensation of contrast between the four axes at Tenley Circle by framing part of the frontal lawn with buildings. One would be aligned to Nebraska Avenue and the other to Yuma Street, with a staircase and plaza preserving line-of-sight between Capital Hall and the circle.

The plaza would serve as the badly needed front entrance, while focusing the view from Capital Hall to Tenley Circle. Wings that face Nebraska Ave. and Yuma St. would relate the campus to the city streets. The difference in orientation would allow for a poetic negotiation from the historic architecture to the contemporary, and from the work world to the academic one.

At the opposite end of the axis, AU should not have to keep the physical structure of Dunblane House, which does not have any merit for legal protection. However, AU should reinterpret the outlines, either another building or a garden feature, to anchor the axis and suggest an imprint of history.

AU's current plan misses a unique opportunity to interpret history through public space. The HPO's insistence that nothing can occlude Capital Hall will render that history as inaccessible the building itself. A different approach is necessary, one that lets us understand the past in relation to our needs and ideas. I believe that I have only scratched the surface of the tremendous architectural potential at the Tenley Campus.