Goodbye, DC (and Maryland & Virginia)

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It’s with not a little sadness that I have to announce my departure from the DC area.

I grew up here, and after college and some misadventures, came back to discover a city I hardly knew, one that was interesting, diverse, and beautiful. Over the past two years, I’ve worked with passionate activists and written with some pretty brilliant people. Then there are the friends and coworkers with whom I’ve enjoyed Washington so much. It’s hard to leave.

But my return to DC was always temporary. My career requires still more education. So, in September, I will start classes at the Yale School of Architecture. It’s an unequaled opportunity that I just have to throw myself into. I’m going to go work a lot, sleep occasionally, and hopefully learn a little.

As a result, this blog will become a lower-level priority in my life. I probably will post less frequently. The content will focus more on design, as studios consume my mind.

That does not mean I will stop talking about DC. I will not let the Tenleytown NIMBYs off the hook. Greater Greater Washington will likely continue to tolerate my ramblings. To make it easier, I intend to start a series in the fall that will let me contribute with less pressure. In the same vein, I will continue to work on and post about my project for Fort Reno, even if it takes all of grad school to finish.

Right – but all of the academia that Yale entails put me in the mood to do something radically different with my remaining time. So, at the end of May, I will be moving to New Mexico to work at the Philmont Scout Ranch. Philmont is a high adventure camp on a working ranch between the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. At 137,000 acres, it’s slightly larger than 3 Districts of Columbia. The ranch is also 6,090-12,441 feet closer to the sky and its pastures contain around 100 more bison than Washington’s.

The landscape is powerful. The experiences people have are profound. I think this promo reel captures enough of the natural majesty  – as well as the old-fashioned clothes I will be wearing:

Aerial Reel – “Philmont” – Ascent Imagery from Brent Murray, Ascent Imagery on Vimeo.

Philmont holds a cultic power over people who have been there, especially those who have worked out in the backcountry. The most prominent Philmont obsessive is Donald Rumsfeld, who worked there in 1949 and now owns a vacation house in nearby Taos. And there are plenty of others, the ranks of which I joined after a trek in 2002 and a position in 2005.

So, I’ll be away from my computer for a while, restoring historical cabins. One last breath before I move on to adulthood. I’ll see you all later.

AU’s plans for Tenleytown up for debate

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Tenley Campus on a sunny day

American University is developing their 2011 campus plan, which will guide growth for the next decade.In effect, the plan is also an understanding between the neighborhood and the university about what the part of the city they share should look like in 2020 – and 2060.

In addition to some new buildings on campus AU proposes two major changes: First, the university would erect several buildings on some underused parking lots near campus, which I’ll discuss in a later article. The second proposal would relocate the growing Washington College of Law to the Tenley Campus, a facility between Yuma and Warren streets on Wisconsin Avenue at Tenley Circle.

In the abstract, the relocation should benefit the neighborhood and bring more life to the southern part of Tenleytown. The current location of the school is in an autocentric and distant office park on Massachusetts Avenue, a poor location for a professional campus. However, whether the new building benefits or burdens the community will depend on the quality of its execution and the policies with which the administration operates the school.

Currently, around 800 students live on the Tenley Campus, most of them taking part in the Washington Semester program. They occupy a buildings built for the former Immaculata School, which American purchased in 1987. A handful of those structures are designated landmarks, which AU will preserve; others are forgettable midcentury structures, which AU will demolish to handle the 2,500 students and faculty of the law school.

The site has tremendous potential to make Upper Northwest more walkable and more sustainable. Moving the law school closer to the Tenleytown-AU metro station will reduce the net amount of traffic along Nebraska and Massachusetts Avenues. To get to the current law school building, students and faculty can either drive to the generous parking garage, or take the AU shuttle from Tenleytown.

That access to the Tenleytown metro is especially important to these law students, because most live outside the neighborhood and merely commute in for the school day. Likewise, the Immaculata campus sits right on several bus lines — and a potential streetcar line — that will receive efficiency improvements through TIGER Grants.

As a side benefit, the new school would put more foot traffic along the southern block of Tenleytown’s retail area. The current shuttle buses isolates students from neighbors; the three-block walk down Wisconsin would put them face-to face on the main strip. The steady stream of students and faculty would patronize stores and restaurants and justify streetscape improvements that will make Tenleytown nicer for everyone.

On Nebraska Avenue, a well-designed campus would significantly improve the urban architecture of one of DC’s monumental boulevards. Against the other streets, a good architect would be able to make the building disappear into the trees that line the perimeter of the campus. Because the university has no plans or even a design architect yet, the possibilities for integrating the school into the neighborhood are vast. The campus plan is the right opportunity to ask for them.

For all of the potential benefits, the College of Law could still hurt the neighborhood. American could ask for an introverted suburban campus and receive an eyesore and a traffic nightmare. The negotiation between the ANC and the university administration will allow for specific terms of approval to be stated. Design guidelines, operations requirements, and community benefits can be spelled out ahead of time to ensure that both sides gain from the construction and trust is not broken.

American University’s plan is good at first glance. Whether it is good for the next fifty years will depend on how well residents and the university work together to make a lasting improvement to the city.

Cross-posted on Greater Greater Washington.

Russia Today covers women like it covers politics

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Robert Bridge, courtesy RT

Sloppily. And with lots of zhlobstvo. Actually, Russia Today’s “Russian Women Guide” much less autocratically slanted than the usual RT fare. It’s just sexist. It fetishizes sexist behavior, like it’s meta-ogling the article itself – which uses, as a lens, pricy mail-order date with a woman named “Natasha.” At the end, a genuine, authentic Russian woman is allowed to meekly respond. Were it not so inane, it would probably be a featured text in a class called “GEND V3302 Ridgidity Tourism: Sexism and Orientalism in Expatriate Communities.”

Ah, but the deepest irony is that the guy who wrote it, Robert Bridge is an American expat who has totally adopted the look of a stereotypical Russian bureaucrat, yellow shirt, dead eyes, and all. But the best joke is a ridiculous statement delivered eagerly, let’s let some choice cuts of of Mr. Bridge’s dainty prose stand and fall without intertitles and see if it lightens your morning:

Welcome, cowboy, to the Motherland, the legendary land of milk and honey. So what should a wide-eyed westerner expect from a Russian female? Well, first you must be absolutely willing to leave your big bag of stereotypes at the border. They won’t help you here.

Russian women somehow achieved, without the angst and anger of the western women’s man-eating philosophy, a sense of freedom, independence and, I dare say, happiness that their bra-burning sisters sacrificed a long time ago on the great battlefield of the sexes.

Indeed, the practical value of a Russian woman ranked somewhere between a good tractor and a surplus wheat harvest: extremely useful in the right situations (snowstorm, famine, revolution), but certainly not the most likely candidate to grace the cover of a glossy fashion magazine, for example, or win Playboy playmate of the year.

Thus, painful questions concerning the rightful place of western women in the early industrial system (exposed for its cruelty by progressive writers of the time, like Upton Sinclair, who wrote The Jungle in 1914) were being debated in the West while, half way around the world, Russian women were peacefully picking raspberries and milking goats in the idyllic countryside.

‘Natasha’ lets you open the door for her; in fact, she coolly expects it, and doesn’t even say ‘Spasibo’ as she sweeps past with a violent toss of her blonde locks.

The svelte Slav at your side expects you to help her with her fur coat, position the chair just right under her awaiting derriere, order the food, and yes, even pay the exorbitant bill without even so much as feigning to open her Gucci pocketbook.

All of the unnecessary guesswork between the males and females has been cleared away, or never existed in the first place. For the most part, everybody understands their role.

As it is, Russian women, who deftly use every inch of their femininity – high heels and mini skirts included – to their general advantage, have no desire to ‘lower themselves’ in an effort to obtain equality with men.

Nevertheless, the system did provide some attractive perks that helped to advance the condition of women without the need for unsightly marches and protests.

They are at the controls of their womanhood and the miniskirt and high heels only adds to the sense of their feminine powers that no man has been able to fully explain. Oppressed? Don’t bet on it.

Are Russian women materialistic? Yes, of course they are. After all, they are women, and I can’t think of a single place in the world where the sight of a mall does not cause heart palpitations in the female species.

The film was called “The Dark Knight.” Since it was a story about the superhero Batman, it was not the intellectual movie of the year.

(For any Russian woman who would like to exact some verbal revenge on Mr. Smirnoff, he is still alive and may be hunted down at www.yakov.com).

———-
Oh, but nothing can wholly bad. The article deserves some credit for including a photo of New Holland Island in the top left corner of the article. Ain’t she a beauty?

Church, politician hosting parties this weekend

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Mary Cheh

This weekend, up north of Van Ness, you have two great opportunities to get food and meet people, one sponsored by Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh, the other by the Capitol Memorial Seventh-Day Adventist Church.

On Saturday, Mary Cheh is having her campaign kick-off at Murch Elementary School in Tobago, from 2-4. The event promises of food paired with speeches on the playground, in temperate weather. Mary Cheh has been a very strong supporter of economic growth, pedestrian safety, and neighborhood livability in Ward 3. Outside of the neighborhood, she has also fought hard for the much-needed education reforms of Michelle Rhee, while also fighting against Mayor Fenty’s cronyism and arrogant executive style. Map out Murch ES.

If you’re more of a religious person, especially one that dislikes meat, alcohol, coffee, and evangelists, the Capitol Memorial Church has its annual vegetarian food festival. Because they hold services on Saturday, the event will be on Sunday, the 16th, from 1PM-4PM. According to the DCist article on theevent, the diversity and volume of food is enormous. The CMC professes to have parishioners from 40 countries providing an unlimited transnational smorgasbord for $10 Map out the CMC.

PLUS: The Tenleytown Historical Society, Cultural Tourism DC, and The “Tenleytown Neighbors Association” are hosting a walking tour of Tenleytown on the 22nd, from 10-12:15. Tenleytown’s history is pretty fascinating, and I regret that I can’t really cover it enough on this blog. You should register at no cost to attend.

Greater Greater Tenleytown is Tonight

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Just a reminder that GGW and Ward 3 Vision are hosting a happy hour at Guapo’s in Tenleytown tonight from 6:30 to 9.  Come by, check out the many positive changes around the neighborhood, and have a drink or two. There will be surprise guests.

How to get to Guapo’s:

The easiest way to get to Guapo’s is to exit through the south entrance of the station and take a right until you’re back on Wisconsin. Walk north toward the Domino’s and the blue-striped building. Guapo’s has a large patio with a big neon sign. Go in and come upstairs!

A look at the new Czech Embassy

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The Embassy of the Czech Republic has announced a design for a new building to replace an aging facility on Tilden Street in Northwest Washington. The current embassy is a not-quite-modernist structure at the edge of Rock Creek Park near Peirce Mill. The new structure will be a postmodern landscraper in a y-shape that clings to the site, in a flattened valley. The architects are Prague-based Chalupa Architekti; I think this is a definite improvement.

This is going to be a really great building for nighttime parties. The designers conceived of a theatrical center for élite receptions. I like the circular pods that are scattered inside and out and in between. They refresh the old Modernist idea of dissolving barriers between the interior and exterior, nature and environment, by bringing it back to the original idea of passing volumes through an envelope. The front (north) façade is a beautiful composition of frosted glass formed into a curtain. From the side of practicality, the east-facing façade of the office wing is fenestrated and shaded reasonably well for actual daylighting.

The architects fell into some contemporary tropes I dislike. I find some of the lines to be arbitrarily harsh and unanimated. The glass curtain in front ends bluntly at the roof slab. Likewise, the entrance doesn’t stand out on a building that already doesn’t address the street well. Admittedly, it is a diplomatic building, so security concerns will cause designers to skew fortress-like and the surrounding neighborhood is hilly and wooded, full of detached mansions like the Hillwood.

So, maybe disappearing into the environment is the best course here. The grass roof slips the building into its site. And if it’s not near public transit, it is near great bicycle resources. The shady Rock Creek trail is just feet from the entrance. If the Czechs get on the same bike as the Danes and install some changing facilities (it’s not clear from the published images if they have them), then it could be a pretty forward-thinking building.

What do you think?

As seen on Dezeen.


Tenleytown Déjà Vu

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As part of a series on things opposed by Tenleytowners, let us discuss the Tenley-Friendship library. Here is a the basic story: a group of opponents, led by Janney parents, protested the loss of critical play space to build a library in Tenleytown and delayed the construction by a few years, until 1959.

Indeed, according to Judith Helm’s monumental history of the area, Tenleytown, D.C.: Country Village into City Neighborhood, when the DCPL began a modernization program for its libraries, they singled out Tenleytown’s inadequate branch. At the time, the Tenleytown library was in a former police substation that was small, dark, and old. But modernity beckoned with its sophisticated information storage technologies, like microfilm. So the downtown overlibrarians decreed from the quietest bowels of their Mt. Vernon Square reading-dome that a new building be built, and that it be built at Albemarle Street.

Their logic was relatively simple, and sounds strangely familiar. The land southwest of Wisconsin Avenue and Albemarle Street was city property with no extant buildings with public transit at its front door. It seemed perfect for the city to use. Unfortunately, in 1955, a playground had already long occupied what was to become the site of 2008’s PPP fight. Even now, the library and the school share the same plat of property (check out this map).

One of the reasons residents opposed the Sears so ferociously in 1940 was that the jungle gym and a few other bits of blacktop stood at the top of a hill right across the street, and perhaps parents feared kids wandering into the new traffic. Then, as now, neighbors worried about auto traffic clogging up the streets, in spite of the streetcars that ran on Wisconsin until 1960. The tactic of throwing the kitchen sink at the project even reared its head.

Some proposed a new library in Fort Reno Park. The park was, after all, close to Murch, Deal, and Wilson, and so better suited to serve all students. That’s amusing because moving the library to the park was tossed around every once in a while in 2009. Both times, this alternative never came to pass. NPS may or may not have wanted to build a parkway through that area. In general, the NPS was as aloof and non-cooperative, just as they can be today.

Then, after five years of folderal, the library opened and people began to forget about the controversy. And here we are again, in 1959.

At top, the third library under construction on April 17, 2010.

Listen: Joanna Newsom at 6th&I

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By Mehan on Flickr (cc)

I  just came back from a trip to New York, got some great reading done, and had an infrastructural safari in Manhattanville. I’ll talk about these in good time, but for now I want to continue my tradition of talking about things that happened months ago.

Back in late February, I went to see Joanna Newsom at the 6th&I Historic Synagogue, and you know, the word “awesome” is really overused these days. It was awesome. You can also read NOMOFOMO’s coverage of the event, which was actually written around the time of the concert.

In the time since then NPR covered and recorded the entire show. If you have a little over and hour, you can listen (fixed so the link works now), and for the good of your soul, you should take the time.

Now, many people find her voice to be skreetchy, generally because most people gave up after her first album, and I can’t necessarily blame them. But her voice has mellowed without losing any of the color or expressiveness that she always had. It may have gotten better, in fact. As an example, check out the album version of Inflammatory Writ, a song I used to find unlistenable:

Inflammatory Writ – Album version

And compare that to the much different version from the concert:

Inflammatory Writ – 6th&I 2010

The setlist was ’81, Kingfisher, The Book of Right-On, Easy, Soft as Chalk, Inflammatory Writ, Good Intentions Paving Company, Have One on Me, You and Me, Bess, Monkey & Bear, and she played the “bummer” of Baby Birch at the end.

Join us for Greater Greater Tenleytown

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By M.V. Jantzen on flickr.

Greater Greater Washington will be hosting a happy hour in Tenleytown, co-sponsored by Ward 3 Vision later this month.

We will be Guapo’s at 4515 Wisconsin Ave, Tuesday, April 27th after 6:30 pm.  If you live in Tenleytown, I hope you can come by on the way from work, or take a moment to go home beforehand. The event is in the upstairs room, and we have margarita and beer specials.

If you don’t live in the area, you should come as well. Not only will you meet many of the GGW contributors, you can meet other residents who have been working hard to make Upper Northwest a more livable place for all ages. I know that it’s far from downtown, but the restaurant is just steps away from the Tenleytown-AU metro station.

Tenleytown has undergone a number of positive changes over the last year, so if you can come out early, you might actually take a look around the neighborhood.

If you like, there’s a Facebook event page, and, as always, feel free to invite your friends.

Housecleaning

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Уважаемые дамы и господа, I’ve made a few changes around the sides and back pages of this blog. The Good Posts page has had some things added, while the About page has gained some more text and lost its cat.

A number of links had lapsed and others needed to be added. For example, the Postmodern Conservative link has been dead since the decline of Culture11, and American Socialism for the Rich and Design New Haven got new URLs.

I’ve added GGW co-bloggers at Beatus Est, Just Up the Pike, BeyondDC, and City Block. Don’t know why I didn’t have them before, but all you need to know is that they write about the same things I do, just 4-5 miles from Tenleytown, and with a wide range of viewpoints. Also, you can check out Richard Layman’s RPUS.

On the architecture side of things, I’ve updated the list with a number of local architecture blogs, including Design Cult, The Straight Torquer, and hidden gem, Washington, DC Architecture: History and Theory. That last one approaches DC with serious academic depth in a surprisingly legible style that I really admire.

Outside of DC, I’ve added faslanyc and Free Association Design, both frequent readers of Mammoth. Also, you can click through to Polis, a blog that covers global urbanism. With one Polis contributor, Peter Sigrist, we will be beginning a small dialogue about Soviet architecture. Check out his series of posts on the parks of Moscow, which will give you a solid night’s worth of fascinating reading.

Now, if you read Russian, you can now find a little section I hope will be growing over the next few months. Already, there is Вашня и Лабаринт (Tower and Labyrinth), Metroblog, Теории и Практики (Theory and Practice), Москва, Которой Нет (The Moscow that Isn’t There), and Moscow Cycle Chic, now that temperatures are getting up into the 60s.

My friend Anna deserves mention for the log of her social life NOMOFOMO, including, but not limited to, such topics as ancient hams and women in sparkly gold catsuits. Then there’s DC Blogs, which notes various DMV-area blogs, including this one.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Peoples’ District, which is possibly the most interesting web presence in DC right now. All it is is an image and a monologue about a resident. And it’s great.