Southwest

If you want to do some cycling and take in some architecture after work this week, join the National Building Museum’s bike tour of Southwest DC. The tour will take place this Thursday (June 11) from 5:30 pm-7 pm.  The tour will take in the area’s mid-century modern architecture, the Wharf development on the waterfront,  historic rowhouses and new mixed-use development.
More than 50 years ago, Southwest  underwent a massive transformation, representing at the time the largest urban renewal project in U.S. history. The effort to create a “modernist Utopia” in the nation’s capital was led by the likes of Chloethiel Woodard Smith, Charles Goodman, I.M. Pei, Morris Lapidus, Keyes, Lethbridge and Condon, Marcel Breuer, Edward Durell Stone and Harry Weese. This mid-century modern redevelopment effort was even highlighted in a exhibition at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels.
So hop on your bike and check the modernist architecture of southwest and the new development taking place along the water.

Docomomo US, the American chapter of Docomomo International, a non-profit organization dedicated to the documentation and conservation of buildings, sites and neighborhoods of the modern movement, highlights the architecture of Southwest DC in its latest newsletter. The piece is by architectural historian Dr. Richard W. Longstreth, a professor at George Washington University where he directs the program in historic preservation. Dr. Longstreth gives an overview of the ambitious urban renewal project and raises concerns about its future.
Charles Goodman’s River Park (top) and Chloethiel Woodard Smith’s Capitol Park (above) in Southwest.
“Southwest is now a threatened area,” Longstreth concludes. “Zoning for its blocks ignores the implemented plans of the 1950s and 1960s, allowing for considerably denser development. Already one of [Dan] Kiley’s major spaces in Capitol Park has been lost for two medium-rise apartment blocks that insult the spatial order around them. Another portion of the same project is threatened by new construction and insensitive alterations to the adjacent apartment slab. [Hideo] Sasaki’s waterfront park may be destroyed. Two projects, Tiber Island and Harbour Square, have received local landmark status, but residents in some other compounds are wary of such protection, fearing a rise their assessments. The current municipal administration seems to regard the copious amounts of planned open space in the Southwest more as a potential cash cow emanating from new commercial development than a singular and distinguished area worth protecting. In the months and years ahead, it is likely to be the scene of prolonged, heated debates.”

Charles Goodman's River Park townhomes in Southwest.
The Post’s Lisa Rein has a piece in today’s paper about the revitalization of Southwest. More than 50 years ago, the area underwent a massive transformation, representing at the time the largest urban renewal project in U.S. history.  The effort to create a “modernist Utopia” in the nation’s capital was led by the likes of Chloethiel Woodard Smith, Charles Goodman, I.M. Pei, Morris Lapidus, Keyes, Lethbridge and Condon, Marcel Breuer, Edward Durell Stone and Harry Weese. This mid-century modern redevelopment effort was even highlighted in a exhibition at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. While it received a lot of attention and many appreciate the modernist architecture in the area, many critics believe that the goal the architects and planners sought was not achieved.
“Southwest, in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol, is a mix of federal workers, the elderly, professionals and public housing. It was targeted by the federal government for wholesale urban renewal in the 1950s, with blocks of brick rowhouses almost entirely torn down. Thousands of residents were displaced,” Rein writes. “New modernist architecture replaced the old, with vast stretches of concrete, high-rises and minimal stores. It was the opposite of the style favored by today’s city planners, who believe that Washington should be remade into walkable neighborhoods with dense development around Metro stations and first-floor retail.”
Marcel Breuer's brutalist HUD building. Photo by Cecille Chen.
Even Smith, who was one of the key visionaries of Southwest, acknowledged the design’s shortcomings. “Despite Read More >

Lapidus’ 1962 Capitol Skyline Hotel
With his motto of “Too much is never enough”–a direct rebuke of modern master Mies’ “Less is more”–Morris Lapidus was completely rejected by the architectural elite during his career. Distraught from the years of harsh criticism, Lapidus actually threw away 50 years of his drawings. But toward the laters year of his life–he died at the age of 98 in 2001–the years of rejection turned to celebration as his own brand of Miami Modern (MiMo) designs became hot spots once again as they were back in the 1950s and ’60s, Think the Fontainebleau Eden Rock hotels on Collins Avenue and the Lincoln Road Mall in South Beach. In 2000, Cooper-Hewitt’s presented Lapidus with the American Original award, which was created for him. (See a good Charlie Rose interview with Lapidus shortly before he died.)
So it’s good to see Lapidus’ 1962 Capitol Skyline Hotel in Southwest and the period-sensitive makeover by the Rubell family getting props. The hotel and its Miami-like pool got the Hank Stuever treatment in the Style section yesterday and Fritz Hahn did a recent review of the various “pool parties” held on the weekends for singles and families alike.
Lapidus’ other hotel in D.C. is the Washington Plaza (formally the International Inn), which also has pool for lounging like a movie star. Lapidus always said that his goal was to create a fantasy world where guests could be actors. In addition to some buildings in downtown Read More >

I just received the new issue of Dwell, which contains a letter to the editor I wrote in response to the magazine’s “Detour” piece on D.C. that ran in the December/January issue. At the time, I wrote that I was surprised to see that the modernist enclave of Southwest was not mentioned in the piece. Hats off to Dwell for running the letter and including the blog’s URL.
As someone who blogs about Washington, D.C.’s modern architecture (moderncapital.blogspot.com), I was excited to see the December/January 2009 “Detour” article. While the piece touched on Richard Neutra’s Brown House, Gordon Bunshaft’s Hirshhorn Museum and I.M. Pei’s Slayton House, you overlooked a major part of the D.C. story: the mid-century modern enclave of Southwest Washington.
As the area goes through another period of urban renewal, Southwest remains the largest urban-renewal project in U.S. history. The efforts in the 1950s and ’60s to create a “modernist Utopia” led to structures by leading modernist architects, such as Chloethiel Woodard Smith, Charles Goodman, Morris Lapidus, Marcel Breuer, Harry Weese and the team of Arthur Keyes, Francis Donald Lethbridge and David Condon.
In his excellent AIA Guide to the Architecture of Washington, D.C., G. Martin Moeller Jr. (your featured expert) writes that while many urban renewal projects have “come to symbolize indiscriminate destruction of neighborhoods (squalid though they may have been) in favor of drab, soulless superblocks … much of the redevelopment in the Southwest quadrant was of unusually high quality, avoiding the pitfalls that plagued many Read More >