New Visions for Washington Monument Grounds

What do you do with 50 acres of under-utilized, poorly maintained land in downtown Washington DC? When the site is the grounds of the Washington Monument, planning ignites a nearly existential debate. Yet one organization has set out to envision a fresh design for the grounds and the monument with an unofficial "ideas competition" that will kick off later this summer.

Despite more than 200 years of unfulfilled designs that include creating museums, lakes, universities, a paved plaza, and World's Fair space, the land surrounding the monument - the focal point of the Mall and most important tribute thereon - remains largely unimproved, unplanned, and dilapidated. The National Ideas Competition for the Washington Monument Grounds hopes to bring attention to that and "develop innovative and creative ideas for making the Washington Monument grounds more welcoming, educational, and effectively used by the public." The competition will launch this summer, accepting any and all ideas about how to better use the space and (maybe) pay tribute to the first president, with submissions due October 31, 2010. Organizers hope to narrow submissions to five finalists by next summer and submit those contenders to a public vote.

Obstacles to adoption of the winning ideas are daunting. The land is administered by the National Park Service (NPS), which would have to support the plan, which would then have to be signed off by Congress, the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) and the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts, none of which have even endorsed the competition. NPS has already devised plans to renovate century old Sylvan Theater, and the Army Corps of Engineers plans to work on a levee system for the northwest corner of the grounds.

Leaders of the competition, however, are more animated by the debate and thought provocation than by a redesign that would actually stick. Jim Clark, President-elect of the Virginia Society of the AIA and Chair of the steering committee, says the project is "mostly an educational forum, that's why we've opened it to younger students as well." Clark has been leading design competitions for 15 years and sees a larger purpose. "This will generate interesting dialogue about the center of our capital city, and will help educate people about history, about planning, and about the status of the National Mall."

As to the choice of this quadrant of the Mall, Clark answers that "this is really the heart of the National Mall. Symbolically it should be the richest area of the Mall from an interpretive standpoint. The mall has many many needs and will continue to evolve. We're really looking at this competition broadly to assess what role the monument grounds should play in the future." Ellen Goldstein, Executive Director of the steering committee, notes that the intent is not to actually transform the Mall. "We don't have any intent to advocate or lobby for the ideas to be implemented" she says of the winning design, though adding that it "could lead to be a transformational process ultimately, even though it is not a stated objective."

The grounds surrounding the monument have changed little over the years, despite the numerous grandiose ideas by accomplished architects. In the early 20th century a public pool graced the northwest corner of the site, and mid-century government office buildings packed the foot of the monument until they were torn down in 1960. Following the terrorist attacks of September 2001, a circular security perimeter was added to the landscaping, which otherwise looks much like it did when the land was originally reclaimed from the Potomac in the late 1800s.

The steering committee has already selected five of the judges and expects to announce the full panel of judges shortly, whose job it will be to determine what good design will never be built.

Washington DC real estate development news

Gehry to Brief DC Planners on Eisenhower Memorial

"Starchitect" Frank Gehry briefs The National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) on his design concepts for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial this Thursday at 12:30 PM at 401 9th Street, NW (Suite 500N).

A major player in the 1980s "Deconstructivism" movement in architecture, Gehry is perhaps best-known for designing the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

Before being selected as designer on the $90-120 million project early last year, Gehry had to duke it out with architects like Moshe Safdie in a multi-stepped, General Services Administration Design Excellence competition.

The Eisenhower Memorial Commission - a 12 member, bipartisan group that includes senators, representatives, former presidential appointees, and President Eisenhower's own grandson - selected their preferred, Gehry-designed memorial just this past March.

But before the Eisenhower Memorial Commission's "tapestries of woven stainless steel mesh supported on the colonnade of limestone" can depict images of Eisenhower’s life and become a four acre reality along Independence Avenue, there must still be many, many meetings with Federal agencies and planners.

According to NCPC Public Affairs Specialist, Stephen Staudigl, Gehry and team will have to present "three design alternatives" including the Eisenhower Memorial Commission's front-runner to the NCPC on Thursday. And while this meeting will just scrape the surface of the three-part, NCPC design review process (read: no concept modifications or rulings to see here yet), the public meeting offers architecture buffs and interested citizens alike the chance to hear how a giant in the world of architecture goes about envisioning a $90+ million presidential memorial. According to the Eisenhower Memorial Commission:

This design not only creates a gathering place for memorial visitors, it also represents Eisenhower’s ability to bring people together to achieve goals on behalf of the citizens he served. From a central location featuring a grove of oak trees, visitors will move to different parts of the memorial, where themes from Eisenhower’s life will be presented. The selected design concept includes columns along the north and south edges of the site, paying homage to the memorial traditions of the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, while respecting the historic vista along Maryland Avenue.

As for the long-term project forecast, Octavia Saine, Deputy of Public Outreach for the Eisenhower Memorial Commission, tells DCMud that the tentative plans are to have NCPC's final concept design approval by fall 2010, to begin construction by 2013, and to unveil the park for the public on "Memorial Day 2015."

Washington DC Real Estate and Development News

Martin Luther King Memorial Taking Shape

Its not easy building a monument on the National Mall. And yet despite the intentionally time-consuming, necessarily frictional process, construction of a 4-acre monument to Martin Luther King Jr. is now, finally underway on the Mall's Tidal Basin.

After decades of preparation, and a groundbreaking back in 2006, the achievement may seem at once inevitable (3 ex-Presidents have lent their support, and corporate sponsors read like a Forbes 500 list), yet so long in conception that DC residents could be forgiven for having not noticed. Hidden from Independence Avenue by a nondescript beige wall, what began 3 or 4 decades ago, depending on who you ask, is at last technically under construction, as contractors begin to place 300 concrete pilings - Venice style - into the silty marsh of the Mall. The pilings will ready the site - a river, after all, until the late 19th century - to accept what will effectively be a large landscape project supporting oblong granite memorials to the civil rights leader.

Once completed - possibly by next summer - the park-like memorial will wrap around the northwest corner of the Tidal Basin, opposite and viewable from the Jefferson Memorial.

Visitors will enter from the northwest edge, near Independence Avenue, by way of a new walkway past the World War I Memorial to better connect the King Memorial to the Mall - a necessity for an area that serves as DC's main attractant but fails to provide for those who show up by car. No designated parking will be added.

Visually, visitors will be greeted by one of the monument's principal symbols - the "mountains of despair," a literal embodiment to a reference in King's "I Have a Dream" speech. The twin granite slabs will frame the entry, two 30-foot sentinels 12 feet apart, appearing to have been sliced and parted, bearing inscriptions from the 1963 speech with themes of justice and hope. Again emulating the civil rights struggle, despair will lead to a path beyond, and having passed through it emerges the view of a single stone, the "stone of hope," appearing as if cleaved from - but beyond - the struggle. Harry Johnson, President and CEO of the Martin Luther King Memorial Foundation, takes up the vision of the entrance: "It will look like a mountain that's been split in two. Outside is rough, simulating the roughness of the civil rights movement. You still have not seen Dr. King until you get closer to the Jefferson. It will appear as though the stone of hope will have been cut from the mountain of despair. [King] will be carved on that stone." In fact the granite, quarried in China, is too big to ship in tact, and will be cut into sections and reassembled on site. Lei Yixin, a Chinese sculptor, designed the statue.

Having crossed the memorial to the 28-foot sculpture of King carved into the granite, who stares back at the entrance, arms folded, the visitor will be surrounded by 700 feet of arcing inscription wall that peaks at the entrance at 12 feet in height, decrescendoing down to two feet at the ends, which bow toward the Tidal Basin. Selected quotes will be etched into the surface, which in its first design was intended to flow with water during the summer months, a feature removed when the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) determined it would interfere with visitors' ability to read the quotes.

Set just behind the arcing wall are 24 large, raised semicircular niches, each designed to "commemorate the contribution of the many individuals that gave their lives in different ways to the civil rights movement." Each will allow a private, reflective space dedicated to individuals that died in the civil rights struggle; some will be left blank "in deference to the unfinished nature of the movement."

Hundreds of trees will be "randomly massed" throughout the exhibit, with evergreen Magnolias along the perimeter, Oaks tracing the arc of the stone exhibit, and Cherry trees weaving into the Cherries that now dominate the circumference of the basin. According to Johnson, the Foundation, which has been responsible for the design and construction of the memorial, will add another 200 cherry trees along the tidal basin. Despite the addition to the canopy Johnson says it "will be very visible from the Jefferson Memorial, you will be able to see Dr. King and the memorial." None of the current Cherries will be removed.

The project to build the memorial has been a separate struggle worthy of its own narrative. The official website dates its inception at 1984 (Wikipedia brings it back to 1968), when Alpha Phi Alpha, a fraternity to which King belonged, first proposed a memorial on the National Mall. After much lobbying and rallying, President Clinton signed legislation authorizing the memorial in 1996. The Foundation was formally organized in 1998, and fundraising began in earnest. Unprecedented corporate support (General Motors eventually gave $10m, Tommy Hilfiger gave $5m, and thousands of other corporations have made contributions), gave the tribute momentum, and the development process its acme. In 1998 the National Capitol Planning Commission (NCPC) approved a site at Constitution Gardens.

But in 1999, the CFA, which has authority to approve every element of any memorial, voted against the eastern end of Constitution Gardens as a site, contradicting NCPC's approval, and later that year the two commissions approved the Foundation's request to move the site to the Tidal Basin. In 2000, the Foundation reviewed more than 900 submissions for the design of the memorial, and later that year selected ROMA, a San Francisco-based design firm for its concept of the memorial park. In 2004, Devrouax and Purnell, a DC-based architecture firm, was picked to carry out the task. Devrouax had worked for the city on almost every high-visibility project - projects like Nationals Stadium, Ronald Reagan Airport, the new Convention Center, and the African American Civil War Memorial. According to Marshall Purnell, a principal at Devrouax, he suggested that his firm and ROMA for a joint venture to keep ROMA actively in the process of implementing its design.

While work got underway, the relationship between the Foundation and the Devrouax did not survive the project . "We continued to submit designs, but at some point we fell out of favor with the Foundation" said Purnell. "We were pretty deep into the process by that point, about 65-70% finished with the construction designs and documents." No one involved wants to discuss why the Foundation chose to remove them, and Purnell will not cast aspersions, saying only that "it got sort of ugly. The contract was terminated."

Up until that point the memorial's construction seemed imminent. Congress had just donated $10,000,000 in matching funds, and a groundbreaking had been scheduled for 2006, but other problems beset the project. Fundraising efforts were complicated by King's family, which demanded royalties from money raised using King's name and image in marketing for the memorial. Some supporters protested that a black sculptor had not been chosen, and others decried the choice of Chinese granite, noting that the use of Chinese workers, who are poorly paid and treated, was not respectful of their own civil rights struggle.

With funding lagging, a new design team did not begin until the summer of 2007, when the Foundation selected McKissack and McKissack, Turner Construction, Beltsville-based Gilford Corporation, and Tompkins Builders (now owned by Turner). According to Lisa Anders, Senior Project Manager at McKissack, the engineering firm was chosen because they have "done work on the Mall, and worked on Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials, and we are a minority CM and architecture group, so we bring that to the project."

In 2008 the Commission of Fine Arts asked for a reduction in the size of King's statue and the stone of hope, stating that "the statue design is difficult to evaluate because such colossal human sculptures are rarely created in modern times...the recent imagery of such sculptures includes television broadcasts of these statues being pulled down in other countries, a comparison that would be harmful to the success of this memorial." Commissioners commented that only statues meant to be viewed from a distance were now built so big (both Lincoln and Jefferson nearby likenesses are smaller), and created the suggestion "of a colossal statue rather than a depiction of an actual man." The Commission also disagreed with the heavy use of bollards, and the resulting shift in perimeter security to a more natural barrier slowed the project by up to a year.

Despite the complications, work now appears to be in its last phase. With $107m of the projected $120m project already raised, the National Park Service issued construction permits last October, and on December 28th of 2009 initial site prep began on the site, which should wrap up in a little more than a year. Says Purnell of the original design-build team "I would just like to see the Memorial built." It now seems certain he will get his wish.

Washington DC real estate development news

Lincoln Memorial Improvements Get Favorable Review

Much-needed changes are coming soon to the section of the National Mall surrounding the Lincoln Memorial, courtesy of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Improvements will include sidewalks along the reflecting pool, new benches and ADA access but, alas, no changes to the reflecting pool itself.

On Thursday, the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) commented favorably on National Park Service (NPS) plans to rehabilitate the grounds on the east side of the Lincoln Memorial and adjacent areas in West Potomac Park, including the Reflecting Pool and Elm Walks. The latter, which extend past the World War II Memorial to 17th Street, will be refurbished with new lighting, benches, and trash receptacles.

Additionally the plan includes ADA accessible curved paths to connect Lincoln Memorial Circle with the Reflecting Pool. Other changes include a security-barrier, with NCPC recommending shorter walls than the 36-inch walls NPS had planned, to provide integrated seating without detracting from historic structures.

"They are pulling back the concrete and steel barriers and opening the vista, said NCPC Chairman John V. Cogbill, III. "The changes will allow for an unobstructed view between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument."

The project will also eventually address the source and quality of the stagnated water in the reflecting pool, but that portion will be submitted to NCPC at a later date.

DC's Newest Monument: Fair Housing?

Ahh, those unforgettable vistas that make Washington DC, Washington DC: the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument...and the Fair Housing Monument? Yes, if Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton realizes her entreaty to Congress to build a monument to the Fair Housing Act - "the last of the great civil rights acts." "Fair Housing and the movement to bring equal opportunity to the real estate market is intertwined with our nation's history. The federal government has been a part of the problem and an integral part of the solution" said Norton in a press release.

Sure, any DC visitor can tell you there are tributes to wars, presidents, generals and battles, but this appears to be the first memorial by the federal government to, well, itself. If Norton finds support, the battle will still be a long one, with Congress having anticipated frivolous monument building by instituting a bureaucracy as a shield, a stop-us-before-we-commemorate-again approach. The National Capitol Planning Commission, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, and the National Capital Memorial Advisory Commission are the three federal agencies responsible for the location and design of any new "commemorative works" on federal land.

Dues for the National Association of Realtors are funding the effort, 100% of which will be paid by the NAR and its dues paying members. H.R. 3425, sponsored by Norton, authorizes the Fair Housing Commemorative Foundation to raise funds for construction and design. If the thought of another memorial in place of a ballfield dismays you, there is no cause for immediate alarm. While staff at Norton's office says the bill will be pushed vigorously in September, and may be ready for mark up by then, it still has to make it through Congress, then through a 24 step process controlled by the various commissions. Of course, the Lobsterman Memorial and Titanic Memorial, both in Southwest, show that there are holes in that safety net.

According to Lisa McSpadden, Director of the Office of Public Affairs of NCPC, the average time for a memorial to go from bill to built is 10 years, mostly due to funding, a large majority of which must be in place before construction can proceed. McSpadden says that the applicant for the memorial typically selects a site and presents the request to the commissions, which then 'guide' the process of design and siting, at which point the memorial becomes inevitable, barring a lack of funding.

At least there may be one new make out spot, unless that's just too creepy.

Mr. Eisenhower, Mr. Gehry Go to Washington

The Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission has announced that they have selected architect Frank Gehry to design the forthcoming Eisenhower Memorial in downtown Washington. Situated on a four-acre Independence Avenue parcel and straddled by the likes of the National Air and Space Museum and Lyndon B. Johnson Department of Education Building, the prominent location will now host Gehry's first ever project within the District.

After tossing his name into the ring late last year, Gehry's as-of-yet undisclosed design has beaten a slew of potential candidates - including principals from Perkins and Will, Krueck and Sexton, Rogers Marvel Architects, Moshe Safdie and Associates, Natoma Architects and PWP Landscape Architecture – for the chance to lay out what the Commission is calling “a unique and engaging landscaped plaza type memorial, with an integral sheltering element to welcome visitors throughout the year and interpretive elements to bring the Eisenhower legacy to life.”

District residents, however, can look forward to more of DC’s famed downtown road closures once work starts. In keeping with the plans to make the Memorial “a unified, defined square,” the stretch of Maryland Avenue, SW currently bisecting the site will be scrapped in lieu of the congressionally mandated and approved Memorial.

The design phase for $90-120 million project is expected to last until 2013, with construction planned to begin shortly thereafter.