Washington has some interesting architecture — monuments and museums, governmental and private office buildings, embassies, and historic and contemporary homes.
Architecturally, what can Washington learn from a city like Chicago?
I pondered that question at a recent seminar sponsored by NAIOP Northern Virginia, a chapter of the Commercial Real Estate Development Association. The conference examined design and culture, broadly defined, and how they determine a city’s character.
A key takeaway was that it’s not necessarily the height or style of the buildings that sets a city or region apart. What most matters is how a city puts together, manages and presents — to its inhabitants and the world — its many natural and man-made attributes.
Geography, topography and climate are consequential natural attributes. Less natural are demography, economic conditions and technology. Then come popular beliefs, perceptions and traditions that strongly influence politics, policies, laws and regulations governing not only the physical form of a city’s growth — its land-use patterns and transportation systems — but also its art and architecture.
Clearly these attributes vary significantly from city to city, making every metropolitan region unique.
Representing Chicago at the NAIOP event was Jen Masengarb, director of interpretation and research at the Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF). She approached the seminar question — how culture impacts design — by inverting it.
In Chicago, she said, it is design and architecture that impact culture.
For her and the CAF, the legacy of historically significant architects and architecture is one of the most tangible and meaningful attributes defining the character and culture of Chicago.
She reminded the audience that Chicago is the birthplace of the modern skyscraper and the city where Daniel Burnham, Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe left their mark. She also mentioned contemporary practitioners — Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Jeanne Gang — who continue reinforcing the legacy.
The CAF plays a major role in ensuring that Chicagoans and tourists see, understand and appreciate the city’s architectural heritage. Among the city’s largest cultural organization, the CAF has a $20 million annual budget enabling it to educate people who become knowledgeable and caring about architecture and who will have high design expectations.
The CAF proactively showcases, every day of the year, historic and contemporary architecture across the city, including its neighborhoods. Public lectures, workshops and events teach tourists and residents about design, design thinking, state-of-the-art building technology and the web of forces shaping the built environment.
As Masengarb spoke, differences — natural, economic, political and cultural — that separate the cultures of Chicago and Washington came to mind. The architectural disparity was foremost.
Washington’s architectural monuments and monumental edifices are well known and distinctive. Nevertheless, few tourists come here primarily to take architectural tours comparable to Chicago’s river cruises and neighborhood walking tours.
People come here because it is the nation’s capital. They visit the zoo and the museums on the Mall. But few of them will go to our National Building Museum, which accomplishes, with fewer resources, some of what CAF does.
Residents and institutions of the Washington region tend to be aesthetically conservative and stylistically traditional. Never at the cutting edge of design experimentation and innovation, metropolitan Washington doesn’t seem destined to be an architectural incubator or mecca like Chicago.
The region’s jurisdictional Balkanization doesn’t help. The Washington area is split between two states encompassing various counties, cities and towns, with a federal district controlled by Congress at the center. Even Washington-area architects are split up, divided among three chapters of the American Institute of Architects based in the District, Maryland and Northern Virginia.
Today’s Washington could use a metropolitan-scale mechanism, like Chicago’s, to identify, celebrate and perpetuate its architectural heritage. Maybe it’s time to create a Greater Washington Architecture Foundation to explore, teach about and promote architecture regionally.
Roger K. Lewis is a practicing architect, a professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Maryland and a regular guest commentator on "The Kojo Nnamdi Show" on WAMU (88.5 FM).
