OCTOBER 2006 » book review

Washington Review

Capital Drawings
Edited by C. Ford Peatross
The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD; 2005
264 pp.; hardcover, 55 color illustrations; $55
ISBN 0-8018-7232-4

Reviewed by Milton Wilfred Grenfell

Children's fondness for drawing houses and adults' fondness for framed architectural prints suggest that the attraction to architectural drawings is broad and deep. Yet even so, books of architectural drawings are surprisingly rare. So the publication of Capital Drawings, Architectural, Designs for Washington, D.C., from the Library of Congress, which is, as its title suggests, a book of drawings chronicling the 200-year architectural history of Washington, is a rare treat indeed.

In the introduction we learn just how very rare this book is: due to the growth of the internet during the course of the book's creation, the originally planned volume was canceled and its publisher lost. The book that was published instead might best be understood as an especially lavish catalog to an exhibition – the more than 40,000 drawings, prints and photographers now exhibited at the Library of Congress website. To encourage and facilitate access to the site, the book is thick with website catalog numbers. If a closer integration between print and electronic media exists, I am not aware of it.

The book will undoubtedly serve as a valuable resource for those listed in its introduction: "researchers studying the arts, architecture, landscape architecture, urban and suburban development, historic preservation, industrial and interior design, the decorative arts, sculpture, American studies, and engineering history, among other related fields of inquiry." However, I should think the book would also find a happy spot on the tea table beside the club chair for those of us who simply enjoy the pleasure of looking at architectural drawings.

The editor, C. Ford Peatross, introduces the book by analogously describing it as a soil sample through the thousands of layers of architectural drawings and prints that document the building of Washington, DC. Although such a book perhaps could be, and certainly should be, published for every city, the borings of Washington, DC, are particularly interesting. Since its inception, Washington, DC, has attracted the talents of the best and brightest, those eager to use the nation's capital as a large stage upon which their ideas might have full play.

In good times, these ideas are wholesome and resonant; in less-favored times, the ideas are fragmented and discordant. The former gave birth to the Bill of Rights, the latter led us into the quagmire of Vietnam. With culture – that of agronomy, politics or architecture – it is the nature of the soil that determines the quality of the fruit. Hence Peatross's analogy is an insightful one, since each of the six chapters, each with a different author, stands alone rather like random soil borings. And like soil borings, the layers revealed are often surprising and abruptly juxtaposed.

The book opens, for example, with a mezzotint of a seated George Washington cradling in his lap the plan of "The Federal City" that he worked on with Pierre L'Enfant, the French-born-and-trained artist he had personally selected to design the new city. On the next page the colossal, shadowed bust of Nathaniel Owings (co-founder of that cynosure of mid-20th-century architectural Modernism – Skidmore Owings & Merrill) looms over his vision of an "urban renewed" Pennsylvania Ave. The commercial clutter of the avenue has been cleared and replaced with a monotonous monoculture of SOM's signature rectangular solids, terminating in a vast plaza with all the scale and charm of a super-size interstate highway cloverleaf, but without the thrill of high-speed travel.

Characteristic of the cloverleafs being gouged into American cities during the 1960s, acres of healthy urban tissue would have to be cut out and discarded to realize this megalomania. The inspiration of Michaelangelo's Piazza Campodo-lgio is evident in the paving pattern, yet the scale difference is rather like that between a bottle rocket and a Saturn V. Design lesson number one: size matters. The gracious plan of Washington was a late flowering from the fertile artistic soil of 18th-century France. Alas, SOM's plans for Washington sprang from the arid soil of mid-20th-century America. It's the Chateau of the King of France at Versailles vs. the Eisenhower Interstate Highway system.

To continue with the soil-boring analogy, since soil sampling is a science, the scientific method requires that the samples be analyzed without bias. It so happens that this book was written by architectural historians who are something like the geological scientists of the architecture world. Unlike architects, who typically have strong ideological, philosophical, and/or aesthetic biases, most architectural historians see their job as being to analyze, understand and describe layers of architectural history, not to critique them. Like true scientists, their attitude seems to be that of innocent wonder at the profusion, diversity and biz-arreness of it all.

It even appears at times that the writers have an investigator's partiality towards the abnormal, and lack a connoisseur's appreciation for questions of appropriateness. I must confess that as an architect, and one who feels passionately that shaping a city is an act of vital importance, such a dispassionate, scholarly approach exasperated me to breathlessness at points. However, what at times I might personally view as a fault is also the book's strength. It is, all in all, a rather impartial cross-section, and unlike a book with a more definite point of view, such as I might write, it presents the facts and lets he who has eyes draw his own conclusions.

And draw conclusions one must. The sharp juxtapositions occurring in these samplings force one to come to terms with architectural issues when presented in such high relief. For example, some strata from the 1920s and '30s reveal several pages of urban Classical commercial buildings, many still standing on Connecticut Ave., embellishing it with memorable decorum and elegance. In sharp contrast, a few blocks up the same avenue, from the soil of a decade later, in the rich urban fabric of Dupont Circle, Frank Lloyd Wright ("that genius from Wisconsin," as Henry Hope Reed once referred to him) proposed a forest of nine "towers in a park." It would have, at the time, possibly been the largest parking garage on the Atlantic seaboard, stretching a full block-length along Florida Ave. Within the labyrinthine recesses of this anti-urban blockbuster, we are told were to be "shops, restaurants, a huge cabaret and bar, and a motion-picture palace whose thrusting diagonal signposts were to have dominated the intersection of Connecticut and Florida Avenues."

The first auto-oriented mega mall – right in the heart of Washington! Wright was indeed a man ahead of his time. Yet with the ingenuous awe of a true scientist, the author gazes at this section of his core sample and laments that this behemoth was never built, thus "depriving us all of an architectural masterpiece that certainly would continue to rival or surpass anything in town." Admittedly, the mall's more than 300-ft.-tall water-jet fountain would have surpassed anything in town, and made quite a splash. But surely soaking pedestrians along Connecticut Ave. is a practical joke carried too far even by an architect notorious for his dislike of cities.

Another sample from the 1930s presents two whole pages of charming, Art Deco, metal-panel hamburger stands designed for mid-block city sites on lots as narrow as 20 ft. Predictably, this ephemeral architecture is long gone, but fortunately preserved in the handsome drawings of their architect, Arthur B. Heaton. On the other hand, the book presents numerous drawings of projects that fortunately were never built. One such is Paul Rudolph's 1966 proposed mesas of stacked angular concrete boxes for the forested hills of northern Virginia that seem as alien there as Martian colonies and inhospitable to human life.

There are these near misses, but alas, all too many direct hits. From examples as early as the 1930s, we see architects beginning to accommodate the automobile at the expense of the city. Just two decades later, we see accommodation becoming domination, until we are led inexorably to the tyranny of today's suburban sprawl. We can see the train wreck coming, but without a time machine, we are powerless to avert it.

Capital Drawings presents an unmatched glimpse of the history of Washington's ongoing project to flesh-out L'Enfant's plan with, as he described, "that aggrandizement of embellishment which the increase of the wealth of the National will permit it to pursue at any period however remote." In some degree, the history of the building of Washington is by extension a history of the settling and unsettling of the whole nation.

Hence, the lessons that can be learned from these pages are applicable far beyond the city of Washin-gton. In this book there is much to celebrate, much to lament and an infinite amount to learn. For those of us in the building world, one great lesson is how incumbent upon each of us it is to enrich and cultivate the architectural soil of our own time. Since, as this book makes clear, it is from this that cities are grown, and not, as the romantic myth would have it, from the solitary minds of architects working sui generis. TB

Milton W. Grenfell is an architect working in Washington, DC. His firm, Grenfell Architecture, is committed to practicing in the tradition of Western architecture and urbanism. Grenfell is a past recipient of Classical America's Arthur Ross Award.

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