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Washington, DC
Ten thousand words swarm around my head, ten million more in books written beneath my bed
We start another page with another tilt shift view from the 2012 AIA Convention in Washington, DC.
Sure there are educational tours (by now you just have to realize that I’m all about the educational tours), but not only are there are also meetings and receptions and classes and keynotes, there is also a massive tradeshow. Of all of the conventions I have been to do far (this is my sixth), I have done what I can to avoid the tradeshow part the best that I can. It’s not that it’s not interesting but rather that it’s overwhelming and exhausting. Unless there is a specific product that I am really looking for, seeing aisle after aisle and booth after booth of ostensibly the same thing over and over again gets to be a bit too much.
If you haven’t been to the National Building Museum then you’re certainly not me. They have (usually) great exhibits, a killer gift shop (I have been known to go down to DC just to go christmas shopping there) and is housed in a beautiful historic building. Originally built as the pension building for Civil War soldiers, it was designed by a general (Montgomery Meigs) with stairs so wide and shallow that he could easily ride his horse to his second floor office. And the open atrium with its massive columns is home to inaugural balls and special events.
So even though I have been there before, I still took an AIA tour of the building, hoping to learn more than I already knew of a building already so familiar. The tour was mostly a recap of its history, but there were a few things that made it worthwhile, including a visit to all of the floors (including the upper balcony) which is almost always otherwise closed to visitors.
Right across First Street from the Capitol are two buildings. On the left is the Supreme Court and on the right is the Library of Congress. Of the two, the one really worth visiting isn’t the Supreme Court. The inside of the Library of Congress (also known as the Thomas Jefferson Building, even though Tom likely would not have been a big fan of the interior) is spectacular (see below) and is easily worth that walk across First Street.
I base my decision to attend an AIA Convention based on the quality of the educational tours offered, and so far, most have them have passed this test (sorry, 2007 San Antonio). Washington offered an interesting mix of buildings I’ve been to (National Building Museum, night monument tour) and places I’ve never heard of (US Peace Institute, a private home tour) including this one. ET157 took us to nearby Hollin Hills, Virginia, an entire neighborhood with all of the houses designed by one architect (Charles Goodman) and all in a consistent Mid-Century Modern style. It’s like stepping into the future if you were in 1950, or stepping into a Modern past that (otherwise) never really existed.
One of the educational tours that I was most looking forward to was to a place I had been to many times. ET 160 was a tour of the Washington, DC Metro System, given by architects involved in the original build and involved in current renovations and expansion plans. The original stations were designed by Harry Weese and are honestly spectacular. They are also all about drama. Before a train arrives, lights start to flash on the edges of the platform- then when the train finally comes, it blocks the edge uplighting creating a massive approaching dark shadow and a real presence in the station. Luckily the tour was everything I hoped for- we started off with an office presentation and then headed on trains and in stations to hear stories about what we were seeing and why and how it came to be.
This was also my last tour as we close out the 2012 AIA Convention. Before you know it, I was on a Metro train back to the convention center to pick up my luggage and then back on another (or two) Metro train(s) again to Union Station. There an Amtrak regional train would be waiting to get me quickly back to New York’s awful Penn Station and an incredibly slow New Jersey Transit train home.
How can there be more pictures? Didn’t we just close out the convention?
Through the magic of slideshows, real time chronological order is merely a suggestion that won’t hold us back if we refuse to let it. This is the National Mall on a sunny day in March that luckily also breezy enough for a scheduled kite festival to actually work out in the end. Careful viewers may notice that one of the many people pictured below looks suspiciously like my older niece, and those careful viewers would be correct. Luckily this year, the kite festival coincided with the National Epilepsy Walk, where, per tradition, we walked around the mall and monuments in support of my younger niece.
We’re bouncing back to the AIA Convention and ET 128, which featured a tour of the always awesome Hirshhorn Museum and a presentation by an architect from Diller, Scofidio + Renfro about the much delayed Bloomberg Seasonal Inflatable Structure, an inflatable special events space that would fill the donut hole of the Hirshhorn twice a year. As soon as the presentation was over, the architect asked if anyone had any questions and everyone’s hand went up, even mine.
This is an interesting idea that is just, well, not a good one to be honest. It can only be used in the spring and fall since it can’t be air conditioned, there is no acoustic value to the bubble so sounds will bounce off the concrete circle inside, the weight of the air will require reinforcing to the basement and, in the event of an emergency, the air pressure inside will be so great that direct emergency exits would cause visitors to be propelled out at great speeds and (likely) great injury. That’s one way to put the word emergency back into emergency exit.
But wait, there’s more
I go to these AIA Conventions almost every year, meaning that there’s lots of slideshows and pictures and stories from all sorts of different cities, showing off their best architecture and design for all to see.
