New Faces for L'Enfant

The 20th century may be an age of reinforced concrete, steel, aluminum and glass. But when it comes to city planning, architects can only express admiration for the grand design for Washington, D.C., as it was originally laid down by France's Pierre Charles L'Enfant in 1791. No architect affirms this more staunchly than San Francisco's Nathaniel Owings, senior member of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. He has good reason to: he is chairman of the President's Temporary Commission on Pennsylvania Avenue and is also responsible for drafting a master plan for developing the mile-long Capitol Mall. In both cases his aim is the same: "A return to the simple but grand design of two centuries ago."

Already plans are going ahead for a huge reflecting basin at the base of the Capitol (a new freeway will be routed underneath the basin). Elsewhere, plans are being developed for underground parking for 25,000 cars, which at present clog the Mall and surround the Lincoln Memorial with a carbon-monoxide sea at rush hour. Funds are also now available for the Pershing Monument, which will serve as the nucleus for a new National Center at the White House end of Pennsylvania Avenue. And as of last week, most of the go ahead signals had been given for three major structures that Owings believes will give impressive body and substance to the emerging new Washington.

Fortress of Mystery. In what was hailed as a landmark event in giving back to Pennsylvania Avenue its role as "the axis of the nation," drawings were completed for a new $60 million FBI building, the first major federal building to go up on the avenue in a quarter of a century. The monumental structure, designed by Chicago's C. F. Murphy Assocs., will stand at the corner of the proposed new "Market Square," to occupy one side of Pennsylvania Avenue between Seventh and Ninth streets. The imposing facade will rise the maximum 160 ft. permitted above Pennsylvania Avenue, beyond a 50-ft.-wide sidewalk (the other three sides of the building will be set off by a sunken garden, giving a moatlike effect). Windows will be small, for security reasons, while on the E Street side the building is to be dominated by eight columns, with a two-story ring of offices joining them at the top--to hold the FBI's active security files. Explains Murphy Architect Stanley Gladych: "It is a strong, severe building, like a fortress. We tried to convey a sense of mystery about the organization."

In a totally different vein, New Haven's Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo & Assocs. has designed the buoyant $10,000,000 National Aquarium to be transparently clear and open. Located at Haines Point, in spacious Potomac Park, it is to be crowned by a 114-ft.-high greenhouse, shaped like a streamlined horseshoe, which will permit scientists from the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife to construct complete ecologies, or natural environments, within it. Reconstructed portions of the Florida Everglades, coral reefs and East and West Coast tidal pools will display not only fish but also insects and even birds in native common habitats.

Saving the Vista. Fronting on the Mall itself, adjacent to the Smithsonian and diagonally across from the National Gallery of Art, will rise the $15 million Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum for the $25450 million Hirshhorn gift of sculpture and paintings. Architect Gordon Bunshaft has designed a massive doughnut, to be clad in marble, as sculptural as any created by Isamu Noguchi and so vast that Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum would drop neatly into the hole. The new five-level museum will add a revolution ary new presence, from its coffered concrete underside (the museum will actually "float" above its plaza on four muscular piers) to its eccentric center court, purposely designed off-center so that galleries on the upper floors will be of varying depths and shapes.

The site picked for the Hirshhorn Museum is actually on a secondary axis laid out on the Mall 50 years ago, and Bunshaft emphasizes this by projecting across the Mall a 500-ft.-long reflecting pool surrounded by broad walkways for outdoor sculpture displays. But he had no desire to interrupt the two-mile vista that stretches from the Capitol past the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial--a vista Bunshaft considers "one of the greatest in all architecture." Instead, he has sunk the pool and sculpture area 7 ft. below the Mall level. So vast are distances in official Washington that the 7-ft. dip will appear, if at all, as the merest line across the grass.

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