APRIL 2009 » book review

Looking Back, and Ahead

Designing the Nation's Capital - The 1901 Plan
for Washington, D.C.
edited by Sue Kohler and Pamela Scott
U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, Washington, DC; 2006
359 pp; paperback; numerous historic drawings and
photos; $39.95
ISBN 0-16-075223-X

Reviewed by Milton Grenfell

Most American cities have been designed by the cold hard hand of mammon. Freed from the grand, transcendent visions of church and crown, civic design in this most commercial of nations has usually been about facilitating the sale of real estate. One notable exception to this was the planning of our nation's capital, Washington, DC, which in the words of our first president, "in size, form and elegance must look beyond the present day." But even with this best of intentions, real estate interests, changing technologies, poor taste and lack of vision conspired to reduce Washington, DC, to not much more than another workaday gritty American city by the end of her first century. It was then that a handful of architects and planners rediscovered the classical vision of its designer Pierre L'Enfant and the Founding Fathers, and launched a long arduous campaign to restore this vision.

The result was the McMillan Plan of 1901 and the monumental Washington, DC, of today. To get a sense of the magnitude of this planning transformation, imagine a tidal marsh where the Lincoln Memorial and reflecting pool lie; lumber yards and a gas plant where the Federal Triangle stands; a railroad station where John Russell Pope built the National Gallery; no Cass Gilbert Supreme Court building; and no Jefferson Memorial or Memorial Bridge. You get the idea. In short, without the work of the McMillan Commission (i.e. Daniel Burnham, Charles McKim, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and Augustus Saint-Gaudens), Washington, DC, as we know it would be unrecognizable, and patently unworthy to serve as the capital of a great nation.

To commemorate the centenary of this heroic achievement, in 2006 the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts had Sue Kohler and Pamela Scott produce Designing the Nation's Capital - The 1901 Plan for Washington, D.C. The book is seven chapters by seven different authors, each exploring a different facet of the Commission's work, with each so rich in scholarship, seldom seen images, and imaginative insight, that each could stand alone as a fine small book. Reading this distillation of what was for the authors decades of research on the McMillan Plan, gives the reader an incomparable cross section of this stupendous achievement by a handful of men over the course of less than 40 years.

Jon Peterson, an authority on the City Beautiful movement, begins the book with an enlightening look at the McMillan Plan from the perspective of this late-19th and early-20th century movement and its origins in the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. The remarkable fusion of practical concerns (transportation, sanitation, recreation, clean air and water etc.), aesthetic concerns and buoyant can-do optimism which characterized the City Beautiful movement, hugely improved American urban life. And nowhere was the vision more fully realized than in Washington, DC.

In the second chapter, architectural historian Tony Wrenn presents his rediscovery of Glenn Brown, the man who rediscovered L'Enfant's plan in the decade preceding the McMillan Commission. Wrenn convincingly makes the case that it was the Washington, DC, architect Brown, who through his scholarship, political prowess, and leadership as Secretary of the AIA, was the masterful but unsung impresario who orchestrated the people and events which led to the McMillan Plan.

Pamela Scott's chapter, "A City Designed as a Work of Art" chronicles how L'Enfant's grand artistic vision for Washington, DC, was picked up and shaped into new art by the consummate skills of the Commission's five members, who were unquestionably among the finest artists of the day in their respective fields.

Timothy Davis, a National Park Service historian, in his chapter points out how central the McMillan Commission's embrace of the then-nascent public parks movement was to the plan, and to the public's support for it. In Chapter V, Dana Dalrymple of the USDA examines in detail the aesthetic and political tug-of-war over the placement of the Department of Agriculture building on the Mall and the salutary and victorious role the newborn McMillan Plan had on its siting. Sue Kohler, an historian of the Commission of Fine Arts, recounts the founding of the Commission as it was established by Congress to implement the McMillan Plan. Armed with the authority of Congress and the exalted artistic stature of its members, the Commission persevered through the 1930s in shaping classical Washington, as Kohler so ably describes.

The book ends with a presentation by Kurt Helfrich of the recollections of the architect William J. Partridge, who worked as a consultant to the McMillan Commission and its successor commissions. These personal recollections, which Patridge recorded from 1930 to his death in 1955, reveal the Commission and this architect's intense engagement with a wide range of disciplines, from gardens to engineering, from traffic to sculpture, from urban planning to architecture. Trained in the Beaux-Arts system at Columbia, where he was winner of the Rotch traveling fellowship in 1899, professional delineator with American Architect magazine, and apprentice to McKim, Mead & White, Partridge perfectly exemplifies the classically trained architect whose broad command of the arts enabled him and his peers to create Washington, DC, the City Beautiful.

But Designing the Nation's Capital is not merely history, of interest only to antiquarians. All those engaged in the building of cities or interested in it will find these finely drawn and richly illustrated accounts of the building of Washington, DC, an invaluable addition to their understanding of the imponderably complex understanding of building a city. As this reclamation of cities continues apace in our nation, Designing the Nation's Capital should serve as a profoundly helpful and timely guide. Although built in the space of a mere generation, the Commission's work drew upon the work of L'Enfant a century before them and countless other artists centuries before him. And this is altogether fitting and proper, since L'Enfant, in a 1791 letter to President Washington, expressed his intent that the capital "serve as model for all subsequent undertaking in city planning."

It was a classical vision of Washington, DC, originally by L'Enfant and the Founding Fathers, then restored and extended by the McMillan Commission, that gave these plans their compelling cogency and obduracy. For all of us engaged in the building of cities, the lesson is clear – it was the classical tradition, in all its fullness, that built Washington, DC, and it is to this that we must return if we ever hope to equal or surpass it.

As urban critic, novelist, and sometimes prophet James Howard Kunstler quite rightly observes: "This is what I think lies at the heart of the classical tradition – it is not a collection of motifs, not a menu of styles. It is an attitude toward the project of civilization, which is based on the idea that we are poised between memory and hope; that we have come from someplace memorable and are bound for someplace hopeful, and that the present time we occupy ought to be endowed with grace."

For the design and construction of our cities surely there exists no firmer foundation upon which to build. TB

Milton Wilfred Grenfell is an architect working in Washington, DC. His firm, Grenfell Architecture PLLC, practices in the classical tradition of western architecture and urbanism. Grenfell is a recipient of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America's Arthur Ross Award, a board member of the National Civic Art Society, and is currently working on a book of comparative details. His firm's work can be viewed at www.grenfellarchitecture.com.

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