Too Much, Too Soon, Too Ugly, Too Late

Monday, September 4, 2006

Finally, someone from the Washington Post staff got the balls to "tell it like it is". Read Phil Kennicot's article in the Style Section today. But very, very late, like most investigative reports that take the long view after the scope of the disaster becomes perfectly obvious. Washington's downtown Massachusetts Avenue is an architectural and urban design failure on the scale of Ocean City, MD, because DC has a great plan that should have provided a guideline to the planners and the phalanx of approvers but wasn't enough. Everyone cared too much about economic development and utilized the vaguest guidelines and employed what I call overinvolved disinterested oversight. The result is a street of slab apartments with overhanging balconies, self-contained life centers, some ground floor retail, and the feel of total impermanence reminiscent of Wilshire Boulevard in 1964, before Cesar Pelli and Gehry put some sophistication in architectural practice in LA.

Whereas L'Enfant's plan was bold and clear, today's planners are unsophisticated in urbanism and timid to truly, truly and aggressively monitor a strong vision. I know because I worked as a city planner and software development consultant to the city and, specifically, to the Office of Planning. To make my point, when I worked for the city's redevelopment agency, we had total control over the urban design and architectural result of development of urban renewal projects. We had a special architectural review board that had final say as to what went down on the ground. I'm not personally proud of some of the projects in Shaw and 14th St., but I am using this monitor model as a contrast to what went on in connection with the Mass Ave. scandal. I am also a veteran of the Ed Logue era of urban renewal in Boston in the very early 60s, where architectural plans that were inconsistent with the redevelopment agency's vision got rejected and the developer didn't get the land.

No such level of vision and plan implementation and oversight exists in DC. Everyone defers to "the powers that be", the developers' "know better about the market than anyone else", the Fine Arts Commission's hands-off- hands-on review and pickiness of details with little overall city vision, the National Capital Planning Commission's follow-the-leader role as the second Fine Arts Commission, Congress, and so on and so forth.

So, while all of the "good people" in the city wring their hands after reading Kennicot's article today, the truth is that they don't care enough to make the city's planners and politicians care enough to make a truly urban DC. That sounds like the "moral high ground", but in the end it's about the absence of the Ed Logues, Edmund Bacons, and all of the visionary planners and administrators of the 60s and 70s, who, egotistical as they were and wrong as some of their decisions were, knew what they wanted and made sure it happened. We're not talking about Baron Haussmann or Albert Speer or even the corrupt Robert Moses. It's just well-trained, urban sophisticated, visionary, and committed planners and politicians doing their job to maintain and preserve urbanism. And it aint here in DC and hasn't been here for at least 3 decades or more.