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.

Greenwashing the District

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or in some sustainable backwater like, Tulsa. . . or New York, you’re familiar by now with LEED or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. Started by a scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in 1993, this sustainable building rating program has been administered by the US Green Building Council since 1994 and has emerged as the gold standard for sustainable design.

The program certifies buildings AND accredits architects (and anyone else who cares to memorize arcane passages from the the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers standards on ventilation). L’Enfant Terrible has been accredited since 2006 and has won many cocktail arguments against lesser, unaccredited architects in that time.

Among American cities, only Portland has more certified buildings than Washington, but with hundreds more currently under way, Washington will soon be the undisputed champion of LEED certified buildings. A dubious honor according to an excellent and provocative new book by New Yorker and writer David Owen, Green Metropolis: What the City can teach the Country about True Sustainability. The “City” in Owen’s subtitle is New York, and the “Country” is that vast, unpopulated Saul Steinberg's “View of the World”. Owen’s thesis is simple: that thanks to its sheer density, New York City is the most sustainable city in America and that when one considers all the externalities, the most inefficient building in Manhattan is better than the most sustainable building outside of a city. Owen makes a strong case. A majority of New York’s commuters take mass transit or walk to their jobs in tall buildings served by centralized infrastructure. New Yorkers, like city dwellers all over the world, consume fewer resources per capita. If you love the country, you should live in a city.

As a counterpoint, Owen singles out Washington DC as the antithesis of New York’s compact, sustainable design. Washington’s fatal flaws, according to Owen, are L’Enfant’s plan for broad avenues and sweeping public spaces and Washington’s restriction on building height, all of which conspire to spread the city out and make density impossible. “The sprawl of Metropolitan Washington is not a perversion of L’Enfant’s plan,” says Owen, “It’s the logical result.”

But Owen reserves his most pointed criticism for the very tool we hope will make our cities greener, one building at a time: LEED. It’s a little known fact that most architects, particularly the ones who take sustainability seriously, all hate LEED. With its prescriptions and brownie points for bike racks and proximity to alternative fueling stations, LEED is — in Owen’s estimation — both too difficult and too easy. Too difficult because the process is stupifyingly bureaucratic, requiring even LEED accredited designers to hire expensive LEED accredited consultants to manage the paperwork. And too easy because even after much refinement, many designers and developers still game the system with a few cosmetic changes to achieve LEED certification with a minimum of effort, expense, or innovation.

Owen sites a 2008 study by the USGBC that LEED certified buildings rent for $11.24 per square foot more and sell for $177 per square foot more than non-LEED buildings and enjoy 3.8% higher occupancy rates. This lesson has not been lost on developers in Washington and one can hardly blame them for taking every advantage in this economy. On your next drive around the city, look carefully at the construction signs and you’ll discover how few new project are not LEED certified. But the question remains: is our city really more sustainable, or is this just greenwashing on a colossal scale?

Notes from the Underground

DC Mud is pleased to announce it’s new architecture column, “L’Enfant Terrible” by Andrew Cocke. Though he left his urban heart in Manhattan years ago, Andrew is a Washington native, returning in 2007 after living and working in New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Shanghai and Hong Kong. He studied architecture and planning at Virginia and Yale, is LEED accredited, and teaches architecture at the Catholic University of America. He started his practice, HERE design in 2006 which specializes in high performance sustainable design.
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Could it get any worse for Michael McBride, manager of MetroArts, Metro’s Art in Transit program? After numerous snowmageddon delays and a derailment last month crowned Metro’s abysmal safety record, the agency cheerfully announced the latest acquisitions for their Art in Transit program, prompting many Washingtonians to ask why Metro is spending money on art when it can’t even keep its passengers and employees safe. And then came the insult to injury: McBride, along with dozens of other Metro employees, was laid off in an effort to close Metro’s forty million dollar budget gap.

To set the record straight, artwork in Metro is funded entirely by private donations, and McBride was promptly reinstated by Metro’s board. But McBride’s greatest challenge remains: how to place art in such an overbearing, dark, inhospitable place.

Don’t get me wrong. This critic, like most architects, loves Metro, but it is a decidedly difficult venue for art. If you ask architects to name their favorite architecture in Washington they will mention the White House, the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol; the usual suspects. In 2006 the American Institute of Architects asked their members (and civilians too) to name their favorite architecture in America and surprisingly Harry Weese’s brutalist design for the Metro system was ranked number 14 among buildings in Washington (and 106 nationally). And if the poll had been limited to architects, Metro might well have ranked higher.

Weese’s great innovation was to design the stations not as a series of ever deeper basements but as a single subterranean nave into which the mezzanine concourses are loosely inserted like ships in a bottle allowing fluorescent lamps at the base of each curved wall and between the tracks to wash the entire volume with light. Weese rejected the white-glazed ceramic tile that had been used in New York, Paris, and London subways in favor of raw concrete, dark bronze and dark red quarry tile. The advantage of these unfinished materials is that they hide the inevitable: the cracks, water leaks, discarded bubble gum, and subway grime all disappear against the rough textures in Weese’s rugged palate.

But as surfaces for displaying works of art, they are totally unsuitable which explains why much of the art in Metro is clustered around station entrances, before one descends into the totalizing aesthetic of Weese’s underworld. The only flat surfaces inside the cavernous

stations are the end walls. But Metro trains are rarely as long as the platform so most riders never see the end walls of the station. It has probably been years since anyone looked at Constance Fleures’s, “The Yellow Line” which hangs forlorn on the south end wall of Gallery Place’s yellow line platform—its yellow neon unlit, its Miami Vice checkerboard and triangles hopelessly dated.

The biggest problem however is that much of the artwork chosen by MetroArts is merely decoration, intended to dress up a space that is utterly resistant to decoration; the visual equivalent of Vivaldi played in a steel mill. Hazel Rehold’s “Ribbons and Jewels” at Metro Center might be perfectly suited to a richly-appointed hotel lobby, bathed in the warm glow of their light, but the stained glass sconces are mounted too high on the wall to make out their intricate detail and are too small to have much impact on the cavernous Metro Center.


While size does matter, in the right places very small works can make a big impression. New York’s subway system boasts a better collection contemporary blue chip artists than most museums, but some of the most wonderful moments in New York’s subways are small, whimsical surprises by less well-known artists like Tom Otterness whose bronze alligator crawls out of a manhole on the platform to grab a hapless sculpture or this delightful installation in Stockholm’s art-rich subway encouraging riders to use the stairs instead of the escalator.

Artwork in Metro must be prepared to do battle with Weese’s design. Jorge Martin’s imposing marble piece at the entrance to the Archive-Navy Memorial station picks up and then warps the rhythm of Metro’s typical concrete panels as if Weese’s walls have been torn away to reveal some ancient boat hull entombed behind the concrete. There is an even better precedent in Washington: Leo Villareal’s wildly popular LED installation “Multiverse” which transformed the tunnel between the east and west wings of the National Gallery of Art. One hardly notices I.M. Pei’s signature P-shape passage because of Villareal’s leap into hyperspace. How many commuters would happily miss their trains to watch Villareal’s mesmerizing patterns wash across the Weese’s vaulted ceiling.Washington D.C. is not, let’s face it, an art town. There are many serious artists in Washington, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at our Metro stations. Penguin Rush Hour at Silver Spring and other large-scale murals and mosaics are a perfectly pleasant relief from Metro’s waffled concrete monotony, but few if any will stand the test of time like the great WPA murals.

Just as Metro is taking a close look at its safety procedures, it might be time to reexamine MetroArts’s selection process to encourage works that stand up to and enhance the overwhelming aesthetic of Weese’s architectural vision. And its well past time to enact some procedure for decommissioning works that haven’t aged well. Most importantly, Metro should redouble its art acquisitions efforts. Not every piece must be a work of art so to speak, but each should at least be engaging and provocative because as much as we all love Weese’s stations, they need to lighten up.

L'Enfant Terrible by Andrew Cocke

DC Mud is pleased to announce it’s new architecture column, “L’Enfant Terrible” by Andrew Cocke. Though he left his urban heart in Manhattan years ago, Andrew is a Washington native, returning in 2007 after living and working in New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Shanghai and Hong Kong. He studied architecture and planning at Virginia and Yale, is LEED accredited, and teaches architecture at the Catholic University of America. He started his practice, HERE design in 2006 which specializes in high performance sustainable design.


Washington has been the best supporting actor in many Hollywood movies, but none more wonderfully campy than the 1976 B-movie classic, Logan’s Run. Set in an domed utopia bearing more than a passing resemblance to Crystal City, the movie depicts a 23rd-century society that deals with that quaint 1970s obsession of overpopulation by “renewing” (vaporizing) anyone over thirty.

Late in the movie when Logan and his love interest escape bleary-eyed from their subterranean city and stumble on the ruins of the Lincoln Memorial, gazing on Lincoln’s chiseled visage Logan haltingly intones, “That must be what it looks like to grow. . . old.”

He might just as easily have been talking about all of Washington. Washington IS old. All that limestone, marble, and granite is calculated to make our young democracy seem both aged and ageless. If you want the constant churn of glass, steel, and concrete capitalism, the New York is your capitol.

But look around Washington today, away from the hallowed halls and stately buildings, and you’ll find a growing resistance to the cult of the old; new buildings, parks, and streets that rival anything strutting down the architectural runways of New York. After years of epidemic drug violence and bureaucratic ineptitude, Washington has been transformed by tireless neighborhood groups, business owners, civic leaders, progressive politicians and some very smart designers—transformed into a city where design matters. Even developers, who historically deserve much of the blame for Washington’s bad buildings and reputation as an architectural backwater, have made great strides toward architectural excellence.

Having grown up in the Washington area, I had written off DC years ago and have spent most of my career learning from “better” cities—cities like New York, San Francisco, Berlin, even Hong Kong and Shanghai. I was largely unaware of the District’s transformation until returning in 2007, the same year the District was named the most walkable city in the nation. (New York ranked 10th).

In spite of the recession, the stalled developments across the city, and Metro’s chronic troubles, Washington continues to improve. But we have a long way still to go! Every bad building, every concession to Washington’s fiscal and aesthetic conservatism is a missed opportunity that will remain on the books for decades.

L’Enfant Terrible is not merely an unruly child, but the embarrassingly candid, often impolite, sometimes sage, but always insightful, guileless naif. In Logan’s domed utopia, I would have been vaporized long ago, but given the pace of development, all Washingtonians feel like kids again; adventuring in a city that grows newer, younger, and more interesting by the day.