Tiaras: a problem not confined to bachelorette parties. In the upper left corner of this photo (or, if you're an art-history major, its upper right) is an example of a tiara. These, Julian Hunt says, are a "doodads"—"useless ornament" and a prime example of what he says is the "solipsism" endemic to D.C. architecture.

The older gentleman exiting the permit center with a thick roll of plans looks like he might have been through this a time or two.
Indeed he has: "You know who you're talking to? You talking to someone who's been doing this since 1958." In fact, he says, he's the original architect of record for Ben's [...]

Originally I was gonna do a feature called "D.C.'s Worst Buildings." I asked Julian Hunt, a former lecturer in architectural criticism at Catholic, to show me around a few. He was worried, though, that such an approach would contribute to what he called, in an e-mail to me, "the generalized ignorance or architectural design and [...]

There's only one thing you can get away with in front of Mayor Adrian Fenty's Crestwood abode. If you are desperate, you can park behind the empty 4th District police cruiser and the scary unmarked Crown Vic. You can then turn on your lap top and start stealing WiFi.
It's tricky. The strength indicator varies depending [...]

Sometimes, it's all about perspective: Ask Melvin Crenshaw.
A draftsman, he's been dealing with D.C. permitting since 1985. Today, outside the newly refurbished DCRA one-stop permit center, he says, "It's a whole lot better than it used to be." The customer service, in particular.
He would know: He remembers hanging out for hours in the agency's old [...]

A miniseries in which we examine the Mystery of the Vacant Condo.
The property: 56 Galveston Place SW
The price: Two-bedroom condos from $124,900
The leasing agent: Rhonda Hamilton, Coldwell Banker Household Realty
Listed since: March 28, 2008
The story: Two and a half years ago, 56 Galveston Place was a shell of a building: gutted by fire and utterly [...]

If anyone should know how to navigate DCRA's permitting bureaucracy, it's Allen David. He worked for the agency for 31 years as a draftsman engineer, involved in various aspects of the permit review process.
These days, though, David does construction designs and drawings, and he also works as a builder's agent to get the permits in [...]

One woman exiting the DCRA permit center this afternoon wasted no time expressing her displeasure: "This place sucks!" she said. "Fenty sucks!"
She's an architect whose been dealing with DCRA for five years, and she finds herself here as many as five times a week. And, she says, it's rarely a quick or pleasant experience. (She [...]

For decades in this town, no city agency generated as much citizen grief as the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs. The Brobdingnagian agency, responsible for everything from corporate registrations to business license to housing inspections to surveying to weights and measure to elevator licensing, by the late '90s had been widely recognized as a [...]

One tenant who cycled through D.C. Superior Court this morning had an interesting excuse for failing to pay her rent: She didn't understand the lease agreement.
The tenant landed in court back in March for failing to pay $7,000 in back rent to her landlord. When she finally forked over the payment, she also signed a [...]