Architect Reveals Hidden Details of Washington, D.C.

Today, we're in Washington, DC.

My name's Nick Potts.

I'm an architect

and we are gonna be doing an Architectural Walking Tour

of The National Mall.

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The extent of the mall right now

from the Capitol to Lincoln Memorial,

that's exactly the same distance

from 14th Street to Central Park in New York.

So it's just an immense space and you can feel it,

you're walking blocks to move from building to building.

And a lot of this is due to the McMillan Plan

and it's embrace of these mega buildings.

Right now, we're in front of probably

the most iconic building in Washington, DC,

The National Capital on the mall.

The Capitol building is really probably the most reworked

and remade building on The National Mall

and I would say it looks absolutely nothing

like the way it was originally envisioned.

You know, it's a Neo Georgian,

it's similar to the White House.

You can see the two parts

of the building that don't have columns.

That was really the original Capitol.

Everything else was a later edition as the nation grew

and we discovered that we needed

more space for our legislature.

As the building grew after the Civil War,

things really started magnifying immensely.

So the wings on the left and the right were introduced

which created new house and Senate chambers,

essentially developing the old Capitol

in a much larger building.

At that point, the dome just looked ridiculous.

It was too small and the proportions were totally off.

And so this new dome was built on top of it

totally changed the composition.

What I find really thing about the dome on the US Capitol

as opposed to most of the other state house domes

and the domes it was based on in Renaissance Rome

is that those were all built of stone.

This, because it was on an existing foundation,

because it was introducing and working with new technology,

it's all cast iron.

It looks like it's always been here.

It looks like it's kind of not innovative.

It actually is quite innovative

and doing something new with an old form.

If you look at the capitals

and the columns they're not truly Corinthian,

there's fun things like corncobs and things.

So it's trying to Americanize a non-American style.

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We're here on Pennsylvania Avenue

in front of one of the most famous buildings in the world,

the White House.

What's interesting about the White House

is, like a lot of buildings in Washington, DC,

it's really a long history of being made

and remade over and over again,

to suit a growing nation

and to suit a different and evolving styles.

So it was originally built by enslaved laborers

and designed by an Irish architect.

Not intended to be a palace,

it was meant to be an every man's

sort of aspirational house.

The entire mall was originally intended

to be not surrounded by museums,

but to be surrounded by mansions with gardens.

It was actually designed originally without the porticos

and it was a much simpler kind of Irish country house

with minimal detail and it sandstone.

The white didn't come until much later.

The porticos were added to make it

seem a bit more monumental

but you can see traces of the original building behind it,

you can see the flat pilasters.

In a house like the White House,

where the the walls are load bearing masonry

the pilasters are purely decorative.

The only flourish about the building

are the pediments over the ground floor windows

which alternate between a triangular

and a rounded pediments.

So it's using detail to embellish

what's otherwise a very simple building

and then it grew and became something totally different.

So the White House kind of has a dual personality.

There's the north facade that we're looking at right now

and the south facade facing towards the mall.

In a proper Georgian house at of the time,

sometimes you would see portico facing

either to the north or to the south,

but not to both sides.

These porticos were added

about 20 years after the building was built.

The one to the north that we're looking at now

was more of a porte-cochere where carriages

would drop someone off.

At the time, so this is really

the urban side of the White House.

And then the South Portico,

the rounded one with the Truman Balcony

which was actually added

after the 1950s reconstruction of the building.

The portico itself was there

but that was meant more to overlook the mall

in the pastoral yard that was envisioned

for that face of the house.

In the 1950s, during the Truman era,

the house was really falling apart.

It was way too small.

It had been renovated haphazardly over the years.

It was essentially not structurally sound.

So everything that wasn't the exterior walls was demolished

and a new steel building was built in place.

So it's a totally like essentially a modern building

enclosed by the remnants of what it had been.

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We're standing across the street from Lafayette Park

and directly across the street from the White House,

looking at a row of federal townhouses.

A glimpse of what Washington DC could have been.

When the White House was going up in like 1790s

up to around 1800, this was also being developed.

If you look at old maps of this area,

there was a significant amount of townhouse development.

In the 20th century,

the vision for Washington shifted

from being something much smaller

and more a little less planned into kind of

the totalizing neoclassical building plan model

that we see today.

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Right now, we're standing in front

of the old Executive Office Building

directly next door to the White House.

By this point, we're in the 19th century

and the country and architecture is starting to struggle

with the whole idea of bigness

and how you deal with very large multipurpose buildings.

And it's really a love letter

to the Louvre in the French second empire style.

So even though the composition of the building is totally,

totally innovative and new,

it's using a lot of very familiar elements

that we've seen in previous styles of architecture

but it's going a bit to the extreme with them.

There are multiple columns that are paired

that really aren't doing anything

beyond breaking the building down into a more cohesive

and more legible parts.

Whenever you see a mansard roof,

you immediately start thinking about France.

Benjamin Franklin was a huge proponent of France.

Franklin was a major celebrity in France

and there was just a lot of love

between these two nations undergoing revolutions

under a similar period of time.

So there's definitely some political alignments

they're gonna show up

in our architecture that we started looking at.

Architecture has always been this back and forth

between lightness and solidity.

And here we're in a moment of really sculptural solidity

and trends will obviously swing back and forth,

you know think about this building being reviled

and then loved and will probably be in a moment

sometime soon where people want that sort

of thickness and shadow and relief again.

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Right now, we're standing in front of the Renwick Gallery

on Pennsylvania avenue and 17th street.

So the Renwick Gallery is really peak

fascination with France.

This building is essentially a miniaturized version

of the entire move originally designed and as an art gallery

for the Corcoran collection, the Corcoran Gallery of Art

there were relatively few precedents

in museum design at the time,

aside from the Louvre this Corcoran collection,

which is a Renaissance detail

that essentially looks like a worm has eaten away

at a material.

Interestingly, the material on this

is not the stone that the Louvre built out of

but this is actually brick been speculated.

This was actually inspired by a visit to another site

in Paris, the Place des Vosges, which is a similar sort

of Neo Renaissance aesthetic, but it's in brick.

So the form of the Louvre squished

into a very small compact box and then given a new material

but because nor went down, the runway is carved off stone.

It has to pop a lot more.

And these sorts of Roundels

which are the round pieces in gelatin

our Neo-Renaissance are motifs that fascinated

the architects as they were doing essentially

their grand tour in Paris.

As this changed the museum

started becoming a little bit more like a temple

which is what we see a lot of around the mall.

These kind of Neo classical Greco, Roman temples

and the Louvre was built as a palace

which was the place where a lot of these collections

were originally housed.

Palace style architecture for a museum

was a fairly short lived, but not crucial pivot

in the emergence of museums as a building time.

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6 now we're in front of the castle

at the Smithsonian Institution.

What's really interesting about the castle

is that it shows an example

of what the mall was like before the McMillan plan.

The castle style is really reflective

of the predominant tastes of when it was built

in the mid 19th century around 1847

when there's a big interest

in the picturesque and looking more towards the countryside

than towards the city.

Technically it's a Rundbogenstil,

which is a rounded almost Germanic Luscian

of an English pioneer style.

So it's kind of picking

and choosing from European influences.

But the notable thing about it is it's informality

it's asymmetrical hall, and it's fairly rough hew

And the asymmetrical tower is really the thing that sticks

out the most is this not being a formal classical building.

You can see these carnations and these ramp parts

these things that you, the Norman arrow

when people were building castles

they were so you could put a cannon or guns in front of it.

Now it's purely decorative and communicating

a lineage back towards history

rather than it's than it's true function.

The door portal does similar things.

There are some Renaissance motifs going on

with kind of these twisting shapes and the group columns,

and the fact that telescopes and re sasin

in James Renwick who designed this

had designed several churches

including Grace Church in New York.

So there's definitely an ecclesia church language

also going on here.

Currently, we think of there being a very peer separation

between academia and religion.

But if you go back to English schools

like Oxford, like Cambridge, you could see this building

on the Yale campus, which did a lot

of these collegiate Gothic things.

I mean, there's definitely a presence of ecclesiastic

and spiritual architecture, even if the institution is not.

Because if you think about the middle ages,

the research and the universities were coming

from Monasteries and religious orders.

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Right now, we are in front

of the Arts and Industries Building

at the Smithsonian Institution.

So this was 1881, 30 to 40 years after the castle

a bit more modern, a bit less referential to history

really kind of prime example of an exhibition

style building, which is essentially a building type

that emerged out of world's fairs and exhibits

that were venues for people to trade

and exchange cultural ideas.

The arts and industry's building

is a highly decorated polychrome building.

You imagine a warehouse being very kind of generic space.

That's meant to look like anything is exhibits, come and go.

In this example, and actually in a lot

of these building types, the exterior of the building

be comes a means of communication.

And this is high Victorian style.

It's using brick and lots of different colors of brick.

There are influences of arts and crafts.

It's a bit of an eclectic style that is all about exuberance

and whimsy and vibrancy and arts and crafts movement

came out of a reaction against law,

formal on class izing movement that preceded.

And it was the rise of machinery

and ornament being made in factories.

So it's a return to the workshop

and to the makers versus the machines

and a building like this because it's handcrafted,

you know you can picture the masons, building up the stones

and creating these patterns.

It's referencing some of that.

The blue brick up at the top of the towers

think about different sorts of kilns.

If they need to fire that it's almost referencing pottery

and ceramics work.

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Right now, we're standing outside of the west building

of the national gallery of art, Andrew Mellon be requested

to the country, an art museum, which we hadn't had.

And this site became the site

of the National Gallery of Art, an immense building.

If the McMillan plan was about the expansion of buildings

this is really kind of the ultimate expression of that.

John Russell Pope, who designed the building

really took advantage of the immense scale of the site.

It's six New York city blocks long

and he really played it up.

Art museum really doesn't want windows.

The light, particularly for the sorts

of old masters paintings that are in this building

generally wanna be top lit.

And so he embraced that there are a few blind windows

but the rest of it is just pure wall space

because there's not a lot of detail

because there's not a lot of objects to distract you.

Was about being meticulous.

Even the selection of the marble.

If you look up the building, it gradually changes.

It goes from a darker pink to lighter.

As you go out the building that was very intentional

to make the building appear lighter

and to float a little more than it really does.

It's severe and maybe a little bit forbidding

but there's a lot of thought and craft that went

into every single move beyond what happened

in this building.

And the entrance is the same thing.

It's very kind of overscaled,

but it terminates in a single door, not a bank of several.

So you really feel the importance.

This is a monumental building if there ever was one.

And it knows that the clarity of what Pope did here

was about not overdoing it.

That's why it plays really well off

of the I. M. Pei building

because they're both about being simplicity in minimalism.

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Right now, we're standing outside

of I.M. Pei East Building of the National Gallery of Art

for being one of the newest buildings

on the mall takes its references

and its materials to create a conversation

between I.M. Pei who is one of the great architects

of America in the 20th century and John Russell Pope

who did the west building directly in front of me

who was one of the giants of American architecture

in the early part of the 20th century.

So it's really a conversation between the past

and the present and between kind of Neoclassicim

and high monumental modernism.

In terms of the material

it's using the exact same Tennessee Marvel materiality

of the West Gallery, but making it extremely flat.

So, whereas the west gallery, it's about sculpture

and it's about the play of shadow on the surfaces

of the wall.

This is blowing those proportions up

to the scale of the building

where these ins and these outs and these shadow lines

that are happening that are taking the same surface

and light play of Neoclassicism to a much bigger

and bold composition.

One of the really interesting things

that I find about this building is that

even though it's fully contemporary and of its time,

this is, you know the 1970s,

when this portion of the gallery was built

the building is still brick.

By this point, you know, most stone buildings

had become veneers over a steel building,

but behind the marble panels is actually brick walls

that are tied back.

So it's kind of almost weirdly synchronistic

and solid for a building style.

A typical is about anything but being solid.

And this is another example of the mall,

having friends in Paris and practically with the Louvre

and I.M. Pei who famously did the pyramid

at the Louvre has a smaller version of it here.

That's doing a lot of similar things

in terms of underneath us is a Concourse

that helps rationalize between the two buildings,

the gift shop, the cafe

there's a moving wall that's used for exhibition.

So this Plaza, you know, it's a similar sort of idea.

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Buildings like the West Gallery or the East Gallery

I.M. Pei in taking ideas that were generated here

and building them in France.

It's a complete inversion

of what you see in other parts of the mall

where we're building pieces of the Louvre

that is kind of the cross-generational trade

that's happening.

And you can really see in the mall successive generations

even though some of the language is shared

you see kind of these similar,

you know white classical buildings

the way that they're interpreted

the way that certain societies choose to talk

more about ornament or more about a person's experience

or more about the symbolism of a single move,

tells you a lot about what that society's values

are at a certain time.

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