StructureHub

For the sake of Frank Lloyd Wright’s legacy, I am relieved that his design for Crystal City - an outsize “multi-use” developer’s dream nearly built in Washington, DC - never saw the light of day.  If it were built, it would be the black eye of his legacy and - channeling Prince Charles here - constitute a monstrous barnacle on Washington’s landscape.

Frank Lloyd Wright was no different from most architects in that he experienced the misfortune of designing buildings that never saw the light of day.  In fact, Wright had nearly as many unbuilt designs as he did completed works (totaling 532), most famously including his Mile High Office Tower, the Gordon Strong Automobile Objective, and the Huntington Hartford Sports Club/Play Resort.

Of course, many designs (e.g., the Mile High tower) weren’t really candidates for construction (although Wright was audacious enough to think the tower was technically feasible at the time - something that most would disagree with today); instead, they existed as experiments and charrettes, manifestations of Wright’s intellectual curiosity and ideas for what architecture could do for society and Wright could do for architects.

And then there is Crystal City - proposed in 1940 as a massive (and new for the time) mixed-use development consisting of restaurants, park space, stores, residences, parking garages, and one very large hotel - which Wright fully intended to see built.  The project’s intended location was a rare, contiguous 10-acre parcel near DuPont Circle in a what used to be a residential-zoned neighborhood (where the Hilton Washington is today).  The project consisted of 24 (!) apartment towers and a 1,000-room hotel anchored to a monolithic pier of concrete, which would shelter a multi-story parking garage and support a large garden terrace above.

Luckily, as the Washington Post summed up recently, Wright’s plan for Crystal City was scuttled by the zoning board’s refusal to waive height restrictions (damaging the project’s commercial viability) and the developer Roy Thurman’s tenuous financing situation (par for the course for most developers).

I say luckily, because the project was completely devoid of “contextual sensitivity” and commercial common sense.  As for the former, the main offender was the big parking garage, which would have towered over the street and sidewalk, cast perpetual shadows on the buildings unlucky enough to border the project, pave over the interesting topography of northwest Washington, DC, and block the natural flow of human traffic through the neighborhood.

And commercial common sense?  Like the stereotypical developer, Mr. Thurman dreamed big - way too big; the hotel was too large even for present-day Washington, DC.  And again, like a stereotypical developer, Thurman didn’t seem to care much about how the project would affect the neighborhood or survive over the coming years - he was only concerned with getting his profit out as soon as possible.

If Crystal City existed today, I suspect that it would be in somewhat run-down condition and the parking garage would be a half-empty, ugly, crumbling, much-hated hulk.  I suspect the hotel would have closed many years before, eventually saved from its deteriorating state as a low-rent apartment building.  I suspect the apartment buildings (because they are all the same) would have been savaged by the typical problems afflicting Wright structures, with an emphasis on leaks and mold.  And because there are 24 towers, the management company would have fallen behind on maintenance long ago, resulting in the units’ sorry condition, many of which would be abandoned or havens for squatters and crime.

In some sense, I think Crystal City was Wright’s Plan Voisin.  Plan Voisin was the gargantuan dream Le Corbusier had for Paris; he would have bull-dozed, a la Baron Haussmann, many neighborhoods and replaced them with a series of 18 identical concrete towers.  Of course, Wright was not so adverse to tradition as Le Corbusier, but the two projects are similar in that their respective architect’s legacy is better off because they were never built.  Not surprisingly, even the best architects occasionally misfire.

Incidentally, the WaPo recently posted another article asking various professionals how Wright’s design would have fared if proposed/built today.

Images courtesy of zacharyparadis and Foundation Le Corbusier