How I Spent Part 1 of My Summer Vacation, Part Two

One thing about Washington: you don’t go there for the variety of architecture. After having spent time recently in Toronto, which is falling over itself to build major, signature buildings, most noticeably the CN Tower, once the world’s tallest freestanding structure, and Las Vegas, which is a living textbook analysis of postmodernism and semiotics as applied to structure, Washington is one boring ponderous neoclassical pile after another. Occasionally there’s a neo-Gothic church somebody snuck in, but mostly it’s one Greek column after the other. There’s a reason for this, of course. It was built as a capitol city, and the new nation wanted to impress people with its permanence, and what better way is there to do that than build ancient Greek palaces? The birthplace of democracy, etc., etc., etc., and Greek it is. The major alternative, Gothic, was the architecture of the Palace of Westminster; obviously, that would not do.

On the other hand, the official monuments are a bit of a mix. Sure, Lincoln and Jefferson are all columns (although TJ at least has the sense of the Palladian, which itself has neoclassic roots), and GW is an obelisk (Egyptian classicism, but the word itself is Greek), but there are major exceptions. The Vietnam Memorial, for instance, is a modern as could be, a slash in the ground and engraved names. The FDR Memorial is virtually his life story in narrative of statuary and words and water: I loved it. MLK is a white representational slab of granite drawn from the words “Out of a mountain of despair, a stone of hope.” I have mixed feelings, I think because I wish it were something more modern in approach. It certainly is different from the other memorials, though. So there is some variety around, not to mention the mix of architecture in the mall structures, ranging from (yawn) neoclassical pile to the pure round modernism of the Hirshhorn and the zippy glass modernism of the Air & Space. Pretty much you get your greatest variety of eye candy in a very small radius, in other words. But as for the federal buildings—meh.

I did get a kick out of the Pension Building, home of the National Building Museum. Here’s the outside:


and the inside:


What’s not to like?

On the other hand, we visited the old town in Alexandria, and that was a bit of a hoot, with some just basically old buildings that are always fun to see. I’ll eventually put up some pix on FB so you’ll see what I mean. A lot of the old buildings have plaques on them indicating that they’ve paid their fire insurance, so the fire brigade could feel free in extinguishing any blazes that might erupt. (The ones without plaques must have burned down…)

I have to admit that I was a little disappointed in the Potomac. We cruised down to GW’s place, on the presumption that it would be nice to take a boat ride, and that the Potomac would be either interesting or pretty. One forgets that one lives on the Hudson; as far as I know, there is no Potomac River art style. Oh, well. It beat driving around on DC’s ridiculously busy roads, even if it couldn’t take on the Hudson. How many rivers can?
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