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Washington, DC
Are you a mustang or a kitty, what are you all about?
There was some point in my education when I was taught about math sequencing. Things like after 1 and 2 and 3 comes 4, or that after 1 and 4 and 9, you’re looking at 16 next. If I could go back in time to that class and explain to them that after A’22 and A’23 comes AIA24, I’m pretty sure that teacher would have failed me.
This is my sixteenth AIA Conference and I’m already up to my fourth conference rebranding. Initially it was simple and just an AIA Convention, something I still call it all these years later. Then they decided to uncomfortably add “AIA” into the middle of a city name, creating unpronounceable words like AtlAIAnta and ChicAIAgo. Then they went for the capital A followed by an apostrophe, hence the A’22 and A’23 you all knew and loved. But now, instead of A’24 they’re going with AIA24, which is a little simpler (no more apostrophe) and it admittedly makes some sense in a hashtag kind of way, although I’ll likely still keep referring it to as the AIA Convention for as long as I can.
So with that out of the way, welcome to Washington, DC and the 2024 AIA Convention, or AIA24 as they now like to call it.
I was unsure as to whether or not to attend AIA24 this year for a few reasons, starting with the location. I love Washington, DC but was there five times last year for reasons that you may (or may not) remember. How I rationalized a sixth trip to the same place in two years was to focus on available tours, and the one that I was looking forward to the most was my first one: ET116a The Diplomatic Reception Rooms inside the US State Department. Of course that tour was cancelled, even though a week later I have still not received any notification or warning or reason as to why. I tried asking on site but no one knew anything, and over the years I have somewhat come to expect this level of, well, not quite incompetence but rather a consistent inability to do something successfully which is, technically, the dictionary definition of incompetence. Never change AIA Convention tours, never change.
With a free morning suddenly available, I walked down to a few nearby familiar sites, spending some time in the wonderful National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden, the East Wing, the Portrait Gallery and at the Hirshhorn, where the big Laurie Anderson retrospective closed two years ago but luckily one room, a site specific installation called The Weather, remains as a permanent (or possibly semi-permanent) piece of the Hirshhorn’s collection.
My next tour was ET132 The Silva Apartments: Unlocking Urban Value, which as the title implies, took us to see Silva (or quite possibly The Silva), an apartment building in either the Lanier Heights, Adams Morgan or Columbia Heights neighborhood in NW DC, different maps seems to show different and inconsistent neighborhood boundaries. The building was designed by Grimshaw and CORE, has ten stories and a jagged bay window facade, and is the only tour or program I’ve ever been on that qualifies for GBCI credits but somehow does not qualify for AIA HSW credits. The tour took us through public spaces and three apartments, but the best part was saved for last.
The area in NW DC around Silva (or quite possible The Silva) is populated with churches and lower historic buildings, so its roof has a clear view in all directions, even as an increasingly angry sky approaches only moments before a heavy rain changed everything.
We’re finishing off our visit to Silva (or quite possible The Silva) with an evergreen photo from the basement parking garage. Here an architect dressed all in black extends himself to take a hard to take picture with his phone of a nondescript storage room. I have attended a lot of tours with architects and scenes like this are quite common. On tours, architects tend to wander off, or stop to take photos of door hinges, or fall down a rabbit hole of exponentially complicated questions, all things which might seem annoying but in practice is a pretty good explanation as to why I keep coming back to these things year after year after year.
The next day started with a visit to David Adjaye’s still beautiful (and still way to busy) Smithsonian National African American Museum of History and Culture, one of the best on the mall. I was hopeful that when I arrived at 11am (after the AIA24 morning keynote presentation which was, well, not great) that the light crowds going through security meant that the museum would not be packed solid, but after descending to the basement and then taking the great big elevators down three more floors, suddenly I found everyone. I know DC is a busy place, and I appreciate I’ll never have museums like this to myself, but maybe next time a better strategy would be to buy a late afternoon ticket. The parts of the History section of the museum that I have seen are amazing (although amazing but also heavy and depressing is probably a more accurate description), but I find myself skipping parts when there are so many people blocking so many of the exhibits.
Upstairs the Culture floors were busy but manageable, and were also just as good as I remembered.
After those five visits to DC last year, I was determined this time to focus on things and places I haven’t been to, and the National Building Museum- where for years I made biannual pilgrimages- would not seem to qualify under such a directive. Still, I haven’t been there for years, and their very well done new entry and ticketing area at least felt like I was still kind of seeing something I hadn’t seen before.
Sure that new entry and ticketing area was pretty sweet (I am not being sarcastic), but the draw for me to return to the National Building Museum was their excellent Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southwestern Pennsylvania exhibit. Models, drawings and videos showed unbuilt projects near Fallingwater and all over downtown Pittsburgh, where Wright designed an unbuilt parking garage, an unbuilt apartment tower and, most significantly, an unbuilt but fascinating monstrosity that would have eaten Pittsburgh and Point State Park alive. The exhibit relied heavily on animated, rendered, people free but 1950s car filled videos of this alternate Pittsburgh. I hope to see this type of exhibit more in the future, where unbuilt buildings are resurrected (I don’t think resurrected is quite the right word here) and we’ll be able to finally see the alternate future that fate otherwise denied us.
The first two days in DC were not great weather wise. It was hot and humid, sometimes it would rain and there were even tornadoes around, although all of them were well outside the District. The weather finally started to turn on my second day with a beautiful night (I really mean late afternoon) to see a baseball game. This is Nationals Park, where the Nationals play and occasionally big headed Presidents race on the field. The Nationals fell to the Atlanta Braves in the end, but luckily I really could have cared less about who won, it was more about being there than it was about the actual game in front of me.
