Obama Cool in the Age of Insecurity

If the good citizens of Annapolis ever decide to invade the District of Columbia, drunk, chewing on unlit cigars and armed to the teeth, they will make it no further than 99 New York Avenue, the fortress headquarters of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms. But until that day, the ATF building will remain the worst building in Washington D.C.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the federal government redoubled its efforts, begun after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building, to make sensitive government buildings more secure. In the fifteen years since Oklahoma City, bollards, planters, walls, and retractable security gates have replaced park benches, eliminated landscaping, and narrowed sidewalks around most federal buildings in Washington and around the nation. For most of our important ceremonial buildings, the GSA has cleverly concealed these security measures within the architecture. For instance, few visitors to Washington would ever guess that the low wall around the Washington Monument is the last line of defense against a dump truck packed with explosives.

But even in Washington, the ATF Headquarters, designed by Israeli/Canadian/American architect Moshe Safdie and completed in 2008, breaks new and disturbing ground for architectural insecurity. Driving along New York Avenue (because nobody would ever want to walk near this building) one is arrested by the colossal barricade trying desperately to fill up the block. The ATF offices cower on the south side of the site away from New York Avenue, like a dog expecting to be kicked. In between the barricade and the building is a lovely no-mans-land. Dead end steps lead down from New York Avenue into this secret garden as if the garden had originally been intended as public refuge from the traffic noise of New York Avenue only to be walled off at the last moment by neurotic security consultants.

On the south and east sides of the site, just steps from the New York Avenue Metro station, gateway to the burgeoning NoMa neighborhood, the bulk of the building is hidden behind a single-story security cordon, making 2nd street feel like an alley where a few of the cordon's undistinguished storefronts have been turned over to retail. But these spaces feel like they've been banished from the kingdom, left to live as undesirables outside the castle walls. The only unobstructed view of the actual office building is from the narrow N Street side, but even here the building is sequestered from the street by bollards and planters and too-tall walls and even taller fences and a pointless pergola.

The dead end steps, the DMZ garden, the inhospitable retail, the planters and bollards and pergola--on all sides this is an unremarkable office building subsumed by architectural paranoia, dressed up with empty urban gestures. So why is this building in Washington DC at all? Why not exile it to a remote site outside the beltway?

This was the strategy of the American Consulate in Istanbul, the first of the post 9/11 embassies, which New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman dubbed the place Where Birds Don't Fly. The suburban embassy is too hard a target for terrorists to bother with, but more to the point, its very inaccessibility has made it a symbol not of our highest values but our worst fears. The best that can be said of the Istanbul Consulate is that it is not in Istanbul at all, but far away from anyplace that matters, like the crazy aunt in the attic. But in Washington DC, the ATF has stumbled out onto the front porch, wearing nothing but a top hat and tutu, and is screaming at the neighbors about alien invasions.
Fortunately there is prescription for this architectural nervous disorder: Philadelphia architects', Kieran/Timerlake’s design for the new American Embassy in London. Perched atop a gently sloping berm and surrounded by a reflecting pool, the glass cube, swathed in bubble wrap, is alighted on an open colonnade at street level. The design for the new American Embassy is distinctly urbane and utterly unflappable: Obama cool. Posed conspicuously on the south bank of the Thames, surround by a decidedly urban neighborhood of office buildings, this building is not afraid of the crowds. It will be the life of the party. Home to the "High-Tech-Modern Architects," Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, London is a showcase of technological innovation in architecture.

But even in such sophisticated company, Kieran/Timberlake's design stands out. The bubble wrap insulates and regulates sunlight and features next-generation "thin film" photovoltaics, a technology pioneered in the United States. But more important than the transparent skin, is the openness at the street. The first floor colonnade is a stylish storefront, taking its cues from the transparent Apple Stores, drawing in shoppers from the marketplace of ideas. Openness, transparency, technology: these are the values that America's buildings should symbolize around the world, and the values that should inform our federal buildings here at home. The ATF building will go down as one of the starkest expressions of a dark age in American federal architecture, but there is light on the horizon.

Future Starchitects Redefine Eastern Market Metro Plaza

If you add up their respective ages, they barely break 100, yet five Catholic University School of Architecture and Planning seniors are proving that the one about “age and wisdom going hand in hand” may be a tired old adage at that.

Masterminding a radical redesign proposal for the Eastern Market Metro Plaza for their senior Comprehensive Building Design Studio (CBDS), in which faculty-directed student teams form “architecture firms” and compete against other “firms,” Connor Smith, Ron Elmo, Scott Gillespie, David Edwards and Chloe Rice are approaching their studio project in true “Vitruvian” style.

“Architects in general need to know a little bit about everything,” said Rice, a former politics major and daughter of a New York architect and landscape architect. “In his Ten Books on Architecture, Vitruvius said we need to know history; we need to know physics; we need to know everything.”

Left Brain Right Brain

Applying those principles to their work, the five students - who named their firm GEERS Architects (an acronym of the first letters of their last names) - parlayed a $100,000 DDOT-funded proposal to build a 1,000 s.f. information hub for the Eastern Market Metro on a tired and defaced triangular park site diagonally across from the Metro station, into a different concept entirely. Recognizing that the 50,000 s.f. site also had the
potential to include exquisite but low maintenance grasses and gardens (including a meditation garden), Japanese Maples, flowering trees, a sustainable water harvesting system, bike hub and coffee bar, the students expanded their design in this regard and also determined it should encompass a site of similar size and dimension across the street. In short, what was initially a plan for a single information kiosk, which Rice quipped usually looks like a “space ship” that has been dropped onto a site, would become a 100,000 sf oasis - or urban destination - replete with lush landscaping and key lighting for safety during nighttime use.

“These spaces are very open but there are dark areas and someone had to have time to mess up those benches,” said Michigan native Dave Edwards, who’d originally come to the university for a summer program as a high school junior. Pointing to remnants of a heavily vandalized park seating area, Edwards and company emphasized that a comprehensive lighting system could also serve to connect the two Eastern Market Metro Plaza sites to surrounding restaurants, Barracks Row and Capitol Hill.


Confluence of Clients

“When DDOT came to us, in their eyes they had one client, and that was the tourist,” said Ron Elmo, a Philadelphian who admitted he was equally smitten with art and business, which propelled him into architecture. “But we soon realized that the other client was the resident,” he added, noting part of the design studio process for them as seniors is to learn to interface with the community: to work with the varied clients and agendas a professional architect might face.

Per studio director and Visiting Assistant Professor of Architecture Rauzia Ally, area residents and businesses are truly on board with the depth and scope of the expanded Eastern Market Metro Plaza Project. It is also possibly the first CBDS project that could bridge the gap from concept to reality, with DDOT funds to be supplemented by the community. Ally said that construction documents and permitting will be addressed during the summer, with a projected autumn build date if everything is on course. “This community is very active, so they don’t feel they’ll have a problem raising the rest of the money,” Ally said.

A Little Competition

In addition to GEERS architects, 17 other student firms have considered the Eastern Market site, each creating their own buildable architectural design proposal, according to Scott Gillespie. Raised in New Jersey where he and his father were card carrying disciples of “Bob the Builder,” Gillespie says, “In freshman year, they told us that architects design the stage that people live their lives on. When you’re designing, you’re creating spaces, and I always try and picture what it would be like to walk through that space, as I did with Eastern Market.”

According to Connor Smith, “architecture changes your perception of everything around you.” A Manhattan resident with New Jersey roots, Smith was bitten by the architecture bug during a high school year abroad studying art and architectural history at Cambridge University. He is credited by his GEERS peers for generating the site’s more sustainable moves, including the use of materials such as Turfstone in its water harvesting system and a green roof for the information hub.

And The Envelope Please
On May 6, celebrated architects from around the U.S. will come to CUArch to select the winning design – or designs – with a composite design not out of the question in terms of proceeding with the execution of the project. Overall, Gillespie said, “It’s nice to see the community is thinking what we’re thinking.”

Next Stop: Bikestation

Great buildings often serve to rouse us from our torpor; “WAKE UP! PAY ATTENTION!” No building does this more grandly than a great train station. Emerging into the grand hall of Union Station, the space is like a fanfare of trumpets announcing the king’s arrival. In the 1960s and 70s just as our cities fell into disrepair, so did many of their great train stations. Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station was torn down to make way for a modern sphincter of a train station. Our own Union Station was in jeopardy of a similar fate for many years. Washington was lucky to wake up from that fever dream with Union Station intact. Stations say volumes about the health of a city, more than a remote airport ever could. And so it is quite exciting that an important and beautiful new station has opened in Washington.


Last October, Washington’s first Bikestation opened at the west end of Union Station. Developed by Mobis Transportation Alternatives and designed by one of Washington’s most innovative architecture firms, KGP Design Studio, the diminutive, 1700 square foot kiosk has great ambitions: to remake Washington’s transportation infrastructure. This Bikestation, the first of its kind on the East Coast, is the beginning of what advocates hope will become a network of similar stations across the city.

You’ve heard these promises before—probably from a shabbily dressed, middle-aged man with granola stuck in his beard. But this time the message is delivered by Washington’s sexy, triathlete mayor. The Bikestation is not merely some utopian effort to reduce traffic, or our dependence on foreign oil, or the distance between our asscheeks—although it will accomplish all these.

The Bikestation solves what urban planners call the “last mile” problem. In New York, the average distance between subway stations is just over a half mile, about three Manhattan blocks. In Washington, because of building-height restrictions, our population is more spread out. Washington’s Metro was designed with a station every mile and a quarter, roughly the distance between the Capitol and the Washington Monument. Most American’s won’t walk across the room to change the channel. The rule of thumb for planners is that American’s won’t walk more than quarter mile for anything. So this leaves much of DC hopelessly remote for anyone not behind the wheel of a car.

Enter the Bikestation. With covered parking spaces for 150 commuters’ bicycles, lockers, restrooms, changing rooms, and a small bike repair and rental shop, it contains everything one needs to travel that last mile, as long as that last mile is within a mile radius of Union Station. So if you’re headed to a Senate subcommittee hearing on the obesity epidemic in America, you can grab a bike at Union Station and pedal over in less time than it would take a cabbie to navigate the barricades on Capitol Hill.

Washington’s Bikestation is far more than a noble urban idea; it is also an exquisite jewel of a building. Waiting expectantly at the west end of Union Station’s grand beaux arts facade, it’s overturned prow, all glass and steel, looks like the Acela has pulled in on a side track. One boards the building midway along its fuselage, just a few dozen paces from the top of the Metro escalator. If the exterior is a glass boat, the inside is all boat too--unadorned steel structure and rigging. Its louvered hull of a roof is suspended by three massive steel keels spanning stem to stern. All the glass makes the interior feel larger than it appears from the outside.

Each of the glass louvers opens to allow breezes to wash through the building, carrying the sun’s heat away. The glass is fritted with white ceramic lines to reflect much of the sun’s heat away from the interior and reduce the greenhouse effect, a risky gambit in Washington’s August swelter. The building is certain to become an example of high-performance, passive sustainable design, but we won’t know for another few months whether it is an example of success or failure.

Nattering historic preservationists may be scandalized by this sleek object’s proximity to Daniel Burnham’s beaux arts masterpiece, but KGP’s strategy is straight from the National Trust’s playbook: make the new distinct from the old while respecting the scale of the historic building. From the west, looking at the broad side, the Bikestation looks strangely at home against the backdrop of Burham’s ornate portico. Tilted and curved, it takes a moment to realize that the west wall of the Bikestation echoes the exposed roof trusses on the end walls of Burnham’s unpretentious concourse building to the north of the more ornate main building.

Others will complain that the building’s $4 million budget is wildly overpriced considering a shipping container would have done the job. In fact, $3.2 million of the budget was funded by grants from the Federal Highway Administration, which views the project as a critical experiment to gauge the viability of bicycle transportation in American cities. Most other Bikestations—all on the west coast—are little more than sheds and reflect the attitudes of the car culture toward bicycling. This investment in this Bikestation gives Washington its best chance of establishing the bicycle as a critical facet of Washington’s transportation network.

As DC plans other Bikestations, we should hope that they continue to ennoble them with such great architecture. KGP’s building is not only a test case for bicycling in Washington, it is a test case for ambitious, modern, sustainable design in Washington. Hopefully both will succeed.

Washington D.C. real estate development news