"Unbuilt Washington": Alternative Designs, Proposed Buildings
-
-
- Dagum
- added this
“Unbuilt Washington” is the National Building Museum’s best chance at drawing blockbuster crowds in years. Devoted to the might-have-beens in the wastebasket of Washington’s design history, it begins with variations on the basic city plan laid out by Pierre L’Enfant in 1791 and ends with a spectacular sculptural bridge the museum would like to construct in the enormous atrium of the Pension Building.
But it is far more than a catalogue of lost opportunities and terrifying near misses. It is also a compendium of Washington’s architectural phobias and obsessions, its neurotic compulsion to grandeur and countervailing fear of anything too elegant, too bold or too French. It is, in the best sense, profoundly disorienting, an exhibition that makes you laugh at the absurdity of a pyramid-shaped Lincoln Memorial or a new White House built on the scale of Versailles. You laugh, and then you wonder why you laugh. And in most cases, the chain of questions leads back to fundamental and often arbitrary assumptions about what the architecture of democracy should look like.
Washington residents will view many of these unrealized plans with profound and proprietary relief.
Continued at:
http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=17737
But it is far more than a catalogue of lost opportunities and terrifying near misses. It is also a compendium of Washington’s architectural phobias and obsessions, its neurotic compulsion to grandeur and countervailing fear of anything too elegant, too bold or too French. It is, in the best sense, profoundly disorienting, an exhibition that makes you laugh at the absurdity of a pyramid-shaped Lincoln Memorial or a new White House built on the scale of Versailles. You laugh, and then you wonder why you laugh. And in most cases, the chain of questions leads back to fundamental and often arbitrary assumptions about what the architecture of democracy should look like.
Washington residents will view many of these unrealized plans with profound and proprietary relief.
Continued at:
http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=17737
-
- groups:
- Community, News and Politics, Culture, Art and Style, 6 more
-
- tags:
- Washington DC
