Browse Exhibits (1 total)

From the earliest dreams of Thomas Jefferson and Pierre-Charles L’Enfant to the boosters of the Gilded Age, Washington, D.C. was conceived as a garden its own right.  For over two centuries, the real and imagined city of Washington has been depicted in plans, maps, and renderings as both a front yard to the nation’s vast wilderness and an arcadian setting for the seat of a new democracy.

Beaux-Arts Era urban planning layered a distinct spatial quality into American cities.  These majestic landscapes of carefully framed vistas, axial boulevards, etoilles, and monumental architecture conveyed political potency, social grandeur and cultural primacy.  At the same time, the lucid geometry of these grand master plans systematically produced small, incidental spaces in the urban fabric.  Situated at the intersection of roads, these irregular voids contradict the rational clarity of the grandiose city schemes that produced them.  Roadway triangles in particular occur routinely and frequently, yet never share the exact same geometric and programmatic profile.  At times, they serve as gateways, venues for monuments, or mark district thresholds; more often, their function and importance was overlooked.   My study constructs a historical narrative examining the spatial, social, and political dimensions of these remnant pieces of land in the Capitol.  These are examined both as a whole system and in a series of individual case studies; supported by original photography and mapping.

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