Photo Slideshow: Unbuilt Washington
More than any other American city, Washington is caked with layer upon layer of ideas that never made it off the boards. For every building, iconic or otherwise, there are dozens of unsuccessful attempts.
That archaeology of failure is created by two opposing forces.
On the one hand, the city’s tremendous symbolism as the [...]
1. This sucks, change it (intersection of 18th and U Streets NW)
I have no idea what goes on at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics. I am glad of this fact. I'm sure they're marvelous people in there.
"I dislike it when design tries to force you to do things you may not want to do," says Julian Hunt. We've just dashed across Connecticut Avenue to a dismal parklet. There's a statue of someone or another, a reclining person with the world's most gigantic case of plumber's butt, and some lunching folks.
This park, [...]
"D.C. is the last place on earth where postmodernism exists," says Julian Hunt.
Totally flat front
Very thin façade
No shadow
No setbacks
Guess which of these Connecticut Avenue NW lovelies is a cheap building.
"I don't know how they could have missed this opportunity," says Julian Hunt as we walk to Thomas Circle. He's referring to the 2006 renovation of Thomas Circle, which restored its central shape but, as one blog post put it, turned Thomas Circle into "merely a nice place to look at while passing through to [...]
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.
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 [...]
