Jack Willmore, the builder and owner of the mid-century modern house I wrote about in this week’s Buyer’s Market seems to think I’m a snarky brat. He, or someone using his name, commented on the item:

Thanks for the article Angela, your sarcasm makes you sound real smart …. which I know is important to you.

Dude, I really think your house is cool. But it’s not everyday that you find a panic room and a koi pond in Fairfax. So I had to point that out.

Anyway, now that you’ve commented on me, I’m very curious about you. You and your brother run a home-building business founded in the philosophy of “enlightened self interest,” according to your website. I’m glad people are still building interesting homes, especially in the Colonial wasteland of Fairfax. You also have a very interesting personal website devoted to science and world travel and your general interests. You have written rambling essays on Pablo Escobar and Hippos, the Eleven Planets. You are indeed a Renaissance man, although I do think you could work on the five paragraph essay a bit. I had a little trouble finding your point. I also tried to complete your interactive quiz about the Native Americans but it didn’t work. Did the KKK kill the Indians? I may never know!

(Ok. Now maybe I’m making fun.)

Obama is great for just being Obama, says Marc Fisher. “Win or lose,” the senator from Illinois has changed the way Americans view race, he writes in his most recent column. “It’s one thing to believe in a picture we’d like to be true — a society moving toward a colorblind ideal — and something entirely different to live each day with a personification of that ideal.” And which generation has advanced this new way of thinking? Not today’s youth, but the youth of yesteryear. That’s right: Boomers! They always get credit for everything.

While the District hopes to stop handguns from coming in, Mayor Ray Nagin from New Orleans is …

Logic schmogic. Maybe Roger Clemens and his former trainer are both telling the truth (check out the second photo), even though they are saying diametrically opposite things.

Do not slip while running in Adams Morgan. In some places, it’s a long way down.

AP is reporting that two construction workers at the Nationals stadium are being fired after a noose was found in a breakroom.

DCist interviews the Super Furry Animals. The band is playing with the Fiery Furnaces on Sunday at the 9:30 Club. The Furnaces are an obsession around here especially in our editor-in-chief’s office.

Prince of Petworth gets furious over a destroyed mural.

And Now, Anacostia captures the good and ugly in real estate news. And finds yet another promise of a new restaurant coming.

Fisher assesses the low turnout at last night’s school meetings. He seems to think that this means there is little opposition to the school closings. You can read our own coverage of the school meetings here.

The Examiner reports that a bomb threat has closed the World Bank.

Prince of Petworth hates on some new development.

The mysterious toy White House that appeared, then disappeared, at Scott Circle a few weeks ago is back. This time it’s painted black and labeled, just in case you can’t tell what it is.

It’s not the Toynbee Tiles, but I’m sufficiently curious. Mystery artist reveal yourself! Or give me an anonymous call. I’m guessing you’re down on the state of the union.

P.S. The little house on the railing is on the south side of the circle. On a clear day you can see the real White House in the distance.

One of the architectural quirks of Asbury Dwellings, a low-income senior building in Shaw, is its deeply recessed windows. The ample frames give the building a stately appearance and shield residents from the elements. They do much the same for the neighborhood’s homeless population, which has taken to hanging out, enjoying a meal, and sleeping in them, says Earl Storm, president of the Asbury tenants association.

“It’s utterly ridiculous,” Storm says. “This whole thing is jammed up—it’s almost like you got to put in a reservation [for a window].”

Residents who live in the apartments facing these cozy cubbies are afraid to open their blinds. The wall on the building’s west side (on 7th Street NW) has also become the de facto bathroom for the window squatters.

On Oct. 11, the Reverend Joseph K. Williams, executive director for Emmaus Services for the Aging, shot off a letter to various councilmembers about the window units.

The potential solution? Stick some bars over those window boxes so you can’t fit so much as half a butt cheek in there. George Caruso of Edgewood Management Corp., Asbury’s management company, says that while his company is examining “architectural modifications,” there could be complications with fire codes and historic preservation regulations. He plans to meet with tenants in the next few weeks to review his findings.

As September’s first school bell approaches, two neighboring jurisdictions are putting the finishes on remade high schools. Arlington’s Washington-Lee, just a few blocks from Ballston Metro, and Alexandria’s T.C. Williams, which is near the vague center of that amorphous city, follow (slightly) different fads in contemporary mega-building architecture. Neither approach successfully hides the structure’s awkward bulk.

Washington-Lee is predominantly brick, but with jutting glass-clad protrusions of the sort that have become all too common in downtown office buildings:

Although more horizontally oriented than most structures in the medium-rise Ballston commercial district, the ungainly new W-L is tall for a suburban school. It looks squashed into its site, jostling the curb on its tighter-fitting sides. Its glassy towers project upwards as if forced out when someone gave the building a hard squeeze.

Also mostly brick, T.C. Williams takes the postmodern historicist approach, presenting an almost-symmetrical face to King Street:

The building’s backside is blank except for a series of loading docks—they must be planning to sell tractor-loads of Pepsi and Cheetos—and looks like the equivalent aspect of Wal-Mart. But the more prominent exteriors use quasi-classical detailing, including columns, pilasters, peaked rooflets, and a rounded, semi-detached entrance pavilion on the incredibly long facade that runs roughly perpendicular to King Street.

It’s tempting to suggest that Arlington is trying to look all-business, while Alexandria hoped to create a building that more closely resembles the backwater neoclassical pile that impersonated T.C. in Remember the Titans. But Alexandria has long had a taste for “colonial” architecture that’s hopelessly outscale, like the hulking Old Town Holiday Inn that would probably shock a reanimated George Washington as much as the latest follies in Dubai.

If the new T.C. is way too big for the 18th century, the true expression of its late-20th-century aesthetic is yet to come. Once the city tears down the old building, a merely functional brick shed that opened in 1965, its land will used for the successor’s massive new parking garage.

The biggest new wedgie in town is on the northeast corner of this new 12-story office building, whose one-from-column-A name is “Columbia Center.” (A better tag than “Center Centre,” I suppose.) The Monument Realty–developed structure, which is supposed to be completed by “3Q 2007,” is rising on 15th Street NW, just north of the Washington Post building on the site of the paper’s former parking garage. That corner’s angled extremity stretches all the way to the top floor, suggesting that the structure is some sort of aborted pyramid. Look around the side, however, and you’ll see that this is just another downtown office box.

The front facade is mostly glass, with a transparent four-story entryway at the southwest corner that’s the focus of the development’s marketing effort. If Hickock Cole Architects, who designed the building, devised this unusual off-center entrance to maximize the retail space, they deserve credit for good intentions. Too bad the ground-floor shops will be overshadowed by the odd horizontal shield that appears to float at the second-floor level.

That large piece, which stretches across most of the building’s front, resembles some oversized bit of clear plastic detritus, perhaps left over after unpacking a high-tech gizmo. (A 12-story iMac, perhaps?) It looks cheap, as does the entire affair. The term of art for these glassed-in white-collar corrals is “jewel box,” but no one with real valuables would put them in such a graceless container. Instead, the building suggests an acrylic chest that a six-year-old girl might fill with costume jewelry. Moderately radical geometry aside, Columbia Center is just another low-style attempt to dress up the old midtown-D.C. box.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, Washington experienced an architectural counterrevolution. Many of the city’s new office buildings were designed in a style—variously termed “postmodern,” “historicist,” or “contextual”—that drew on 19th and early-20th-century models. Glass curtain walls and poured concrete were out. But architecture schools still instill reverence for the “new,” even if most of what they prize as novel is now almost a century old. So it was inevitable that the vogue for huge glass boxes would return, and recently it has. But D.C.’s latest examples of the new appear oddly antique.

The recently completed office building called 1101 New York Avenue NW (which actually fronts on I Street) shows how the mid-20th-century “International Style” has degenerated. Although the 12-story structure is clad entirely in glass, it lacks the bold, simple geometry essential to the work of such Bauhaus masters as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The bulk of the box is reduced by dividing the frontage into two large protruding bays, with the center of the facade recessed. The corners have a series of shallow notches, designed to facilitate more window offices. In short, 1101 New York has the massing of a old masonry (or recent historicist) structure. Designed by old-school modernist Kevin Roche, the building is a neoclassical edifice in unconvincing Bauhaus drag.

Like most contemporary Washington white-collar palaces, 1101 New York shortchanges the street level, and provides a hostile environment for retail businesses. But perhaps the worst thing about the place is its stripped-down portico. This crude shelter over the main entrance is the architectural equivalent of a cheap plastic sun visor you might buy on the boardwalk in Ocean City. Ironically, such an overhang could have been integrated much more elegantly into a neotraditional design. It was the decision to go “sleek” that made this feature turn out so gawky.

The list of Most Endangered Places in D.C. announced yesterday by the D.C. Preservation League includes some interesting choices. You’ve got your graffitied frescoes in the old Franklin School at 13th and K Streets NW (now a homeless shelter). You’ve got your Takoma Theater in Takoma Park, built in 1923, which should be preserved because, among other reasons, it’s been used “by independent filmmakers for film previews, including Chris Rock.” Its current owner has been trying to make the case to level it.

Those seem worthy enough. The one I don’t get is the 1900 block of Martin Luther King Avenue SE, buildings only a crackhead could love. The fight to save this major eyesore at the intersection of MLK and Good Hope Road has been going on since at least 1997. And guess what? Ten years later, they’re still vacant, taped-off, and burned out. A fire gutted the buildings more than two years ago, so tell me again why they’re so historically significant?

It seems they are, according to the preservation league, “contributing buildings owned and managed by the DC Housing and Community Development (DCHCD) agency are contributing structures in the Anacostia Historic District, listed in the DC Inventory of Historic Places and the National Register for Historic Places.”

Who gives a fuck? Tear them down and build something the residents of Anacostia actually need and can feel good about. There are fights worth having to preserve historic D.C. This isn’t one of them.

I never warmed to the D.C. statehood argument. Voting rights, yes, absolutely, right now. But the idea of our tiny District as a state seems unwieldy. Admittedly, the main reason I’m against it is that adding another state will totally mess up the flag. Fifty-one is an odd odd number, and I can’t envision any elegant way to cram one more five-pointer onto the field of blue. As it stands, America has the most kick-ass flag on Earth. (Nice try, Latvia!) We certainly don’t want to end up like this.

But here’s a solution—why not just get rid of another state? Like Florida. I spent the weekend in that benighted region, and now understand completely why most episodes of Cops are filmed there. The long, flat streets are bordered day and night with shirtless, aimless-looking men, usually carrying a bottle, invariably sporting some variation of a mullet. It’s also no coincidence that News of the Weird’s Chuck Shepherd calls Florida home–it pays to be close to your sources.

Not only is the geography stultifyingly dull, but this photo…

…represents the apex of local architecture. In Florida, you can count the buildings taller than one story on your flip-flopped toes. But you don’t want to count the buildings, because that would mean you have to look at them, and they are of a piece capital-U ugly.

Now, I must say that I was in the Sunshine State for the wedding of a dear friend—it was lovely. And I have relatives who I also adore who live there. But on balance, Florida has long failed to uphold its end of the Constitutional bargain. For 200 years, its populace has focused almost entirely on the “pursuit of happiness” clause of the Declaration of Independence, which, for the record, is not legally binding. And as far as voting goes, we don’t have to rehash that mess again.

Plus, there’s an economic argument: We can offset some of George W. Bush’s irresponsible deficit by selling Florida to the highest bidder. I’m willing to bet that Disney will want to finally own the whole shebang.

So, D.C. gets Florida’s vote and its star. Done deal.

Now, when we get around to annexing Canada, I’ll have a few words to say about South Carolina.

Everybody hates K Street, by which most mean those blocks redeveloped with bland International Style knockoffs in the ‘70s and ‘80s. And yet that type of K Street building remains the model for office buildings throughout the city. Given D.C.’s height limitations and zoning rules, as well as developers’ desire to construct every leasable square foot they can, featureless rectangles continue to rise. The brief 1980s and ’90s vogue for historicist designs has had some effect—more masonry, less glass—and some new boxes are partially hidden by preserved historic buildings, or at least their facades. Still, there aren’t a lot of new ideas out there.

Now there’s one, and it’s become common enough in one neighborhood that the area could even named for it. North of Penn Quarter, here comes the emerging Wedgie District.

Secret Service headquarters “wedgie”

The wedgie is an angular bulge from an otherwise banal office block, generally a glass-covered protuberance from a brick- or stone-clad structure. With the addition of a new one at 10th and F Streets NW, there are now three of them in as many blocks.

The first wedgie juts from the building that covers most of the south side of H Street NW between 9th and 10th Streets. (It’s the Secret Service headquarters, although the General Services Administration likes to pretend no one knows that.) The building is mostly tan brick, and basically looks like an outsized ’60s high school. But near the east end, a glassed triangle pokes out, as if the larger building were giving birth to an all-glass K Streeter.

This building was followed by Pepco headquarters, dubbed Edison Place, on the northeast corner of 9th and G. Here the wedgie is on the corner, and has a bit of a curve to it. From the corner, the bowed protrusion actually looks as if it is the building. But move east or north, and it’s revealed as a wedgie.

The newest wedgie is at 10th and G, part of a new office building stuck crudely behind some older edifices, including the facade of the Atlantic Building (former home of the 9:30 Club). The main structure is remarkably similar to the Secret Service building—same shade of brick—but features several wedgies. One, tall but shallow, towers above the mansard-roofed house at the corner. Another one, bolder but only about a story higher than the house, flares further down 10th Street. These wedgies seem a rude attempt to upstage the existing structures; they clash with the streetscape without creating a rhythm of their own.

816 Connecticut Ave. NW

Ironically, the angle is a naturally occurring shape in L’Enfant’s street plan, and the triangles and trapezoids created by the intersections of streets and avenues have, occasionally, yielded interesting buildings, notably the National Gallery’s East Building. A triangular prow—used in a classical, symmetrical mode—also works well in the skinny ’80s office building at 816 Connecticut Ave. NW.

The wedgie, however, is neither a fundamental principle, as in the East Building, nor a central decorative motif, as at 816 Connecticut. It’s just an offhand gesture in a neighborhood that was remade too hastily, with too little thought, and with only the basic zoning rules as guidance. As on K Street, these buildings were built to maximize rentable space, with any design elements that would hinder that severely circumscribed. That’s why the wedgie comes on like a bold gesture but actually ends up looking weak.