Walk through a neighborhood that works — one where streets feel safe, where public spaces invite you to linger, where the mix of uses makes daily life feel effortless — and you are experiencing the result of intentional urban design. It rarely announces itself. When it is done well, it simply feels right. But behind that feeling is a disciplined body of thinking about how people move through space, how communities form around place, and how the built environment either supports or undermines the quality of everyday life.
Urban design is not city planning, though the two are closely related. It is not architecture, though it depends on it. It occupies the critical space between the two — operating at the scale of blocks, corridors, districts, and waterfronts — and it is one of the most consequential design disciplines practiced today.
Placemaking: The Art of Designing for People First
At the heart of urban design is a deceptively simple idea: places should be designed for the people who use them, not merely for the vehicles that pass through them or the parcels that contain them.
Placemaking is the practice that gives this idea its form. It asks a foundational set of questions before any line is drawn: Who uses this space? At what times of day? For what purposes? What would make them feel safe, welcomed, and inclined to return? The answers shape everything — the width of a sidewalk, the placement of seating, the presence of shade, the relationship between a ground-floor storefront and the street outside it.
The most celebrated urban spaces in the world — from Copenhagen’s harbor front to the High Line in New York to the revitalized waterfront districts of cities across the American South — share a common characteristic. They were designed with the pedestrian experience as the primary brief, and every other consideration was subordinated to that principle.
A bustling urban civic hub featuring public transit, a farmers market, and a community center.
The Public Realm as Civic Infrastructure
Streets, squares, parks, plazas, and waterfronts are not simply leftover space between buildings. They are civic infrastructure — as essential to a functioning community as roads, utilities, and transit systems. The quality of the public realm directly shapes social cohesion, economic vitality, public health, and community identity.
Urban designers understand this in a way that no other discipline is specifically trained to address. The decision to narrow a travel lane and widen a sidewalk is not merely an engineering choice — it is a statement about whose experience the city prioritizes. The decision to activate a ground floor with retail, community uses, or transparent facades rather than blank walls is a decision about how public and private life relate to each other. These are design decisions with long-term civic consequences.
Technological tools have significantly expanded the urban designer’s capacity to make these decisions well. Geographic information systems allow designers to map and analyze the social, environmental, and economic dimensions of a place with precision that was simply unavailable a generation ago. Data-driven pedestrian flow analysis, climate modeling, and community engagement platforms have made it possible to design places that are responsive to real conditions rather than assumed ones.
Aerial view of a suburban neighborhood centered around a lake with residential and commercial buildings
Urban Vision: Thinking at the Scale of Community
Beyond the individual project, urban design requires vision — the capacity to see not just what a place is, but what it could become, and to hold that vision clearly enough to guide decisions across years, sometimes decades, of incremental change.
A master plan is the primary instrument of urban vision. It establishes the framework — land use, street network, open space, building typologies, phasing — within which individual projects accumulate into a coherent whole. A well-crafted master plan is not a rigid blueprint. It is a set of principles and parameters flexible enough to accommodate change while strong enough to preserve design intent over time.
The communities that have transformed most successfully — that have turned disinvested corridors into vibrant districts, or underutilized waterfronts into economic and cultural anchors — have almost always done so with the guidance of a clear urban design vision, executed with patience, consistency, and skilled program management.
That last point matters more than it is often given credit for. Vision without execution is aspiration. The discipline that connects the two is where the real work of urban design lives.
People of all ages enjoy activities and socializing in a lively community plaza
Designing Cities Worth Living In
Urban design is ultimately about human dignity — about whether the places where people live, work, gather, and move through the world support or diminish their experience of it. That is a high standard. It is also the right one.
At edESTESdesign, urban design is practiced with that standard in view — from master planning and corridor studies to placemaking strategy and public realm design. Every engagement begins with the same question: what does this place owe the people who will inhabit it?
If you are working on a project at the neighborhood, district, or city scale and want a design partner who brings both vision and rigor to the table, we would welcome the conversation.
From Hampton Institute to Roy Wilkins Square, this post explores civic architecture, urban design, and the power of public spaces in community development.
by Ed Estes
Architecture is never just about buildings. It is about the people who move through them, around them, and because of them. It shapes how neighborhoods breathe, how communities gather, and whether the built environment invites belonging or enforces exclusion. That conviction has guided my work across more than four decades — from a transit-oriented thesis project on a pivotal Atlanta corridor to the urban design and community-focused practice I sustain today through edESTESdesign.
Understanding Architectural Impact
Most people experience architecture the way they experience weather — constantly, without quite naming it. A well-placed public plaza draws foot traffic and commerce without anyone consciously choosing to be “activated.” A poorly scaled streetwall silences a block without anyone passing an ordinance to do so. The built environment exerts a quiet but persistent force on how communities function.
A lively public square filled with people contrasts with an empty narrow side street in a historic city.
What distinguishes architectural impact from mere construction is intentionality. When design responds to the real patterns of human movement, economic life, and cultural identity in a place, it can do extraordinary work. When it doesn’t — when it is imposed rather than developed — even technically accomplished buildings can hollow out the communities they were meant to serve.
I came to understand this not abstractly, but through the specific landscapes of Atlanta where I grew up — Historic Collier Heights, the Fair Street corridor, the MLK Jr. Drive and Ashby Street intersection that defined the western edge of my professional imagination long before I knew I was an architectural designer. These were places where design decisions, often made by people far removed from the community, had shaped everyday life in ways both enabling and limiting.
That understanding doesn’t leave you. It becomes the lens through which you evaluate every project.
Case Studies of Community Development
n 1982, my senior thesis at Hampton Institute proposed Roy Wilkins Square — an Office and Shopping Park sited along the MLK Jr. Drive and Ashby Street corridor in Atlanta. The design was transit-oriented before that term had wide currency in American planning discourse. It was grounded in linkage — how the project would connect to the surrounding fabric of the Westside rather than standing apart from it.
Roy Wilkins Square wasn’t a building proposal alone. It was an argument: that design along a historically underinvested corridor could be economically viable, community-scaled, and architecturally distinguished at the same time. That you didn’t have to choose between serving the community and making something worth looking at.
That argument still holds. Across American cities, the most durable examples of community development through architecture share a common trait: they were designed with the communities they serve, not for an imagined demographic that doesn’t yet live there. Projects like the redevelopment of Sweet Auburn in Atlanta, the revitalization of Shaw and Columbia Heights in Washington, DC, and the ongoing transformation of Prince George’s County’s urban corridors all illustrate what is possible when investment, design quality, and community voice align.
The lesson isn’t that architecture saves communities. It’s that architecture done right supports what communities are already trying to become.
Public Spaces and Community Interaction
Community members enjoy a lively, accessible urban plaza with a central fountain and ample seating.
Of all the elements of the built environment, public space may carry the most democratic charge. A well-designed plaza, park, or streetscape belongs to everyone — it is the architecture of civic life itself.
The most effective public spaces do several things simultaneously. They provide room for unplanned encounter — the kind of accidental community-building that no program or event can fully replicate. They accommodate multiple scales of use, from the solitary person reading on a bench to the neighborhood festival that fills every square foot. And they signal, through their design quality, that the people who use them matter.
Urban furniture, shade, lighting, accessibility, cultural signage, ground-floor activation — none of these are decorative extras. They are the infrastructure of public life. Get them right, and a space becomes a neighborhood asset. Get them wrong, and the space either empties or gets avoided entirely.
Future Trends in Urban Architecture
The pressures reshaping urban architecture today are not subtle. Climate adaptation, housing affordability, mobility transformation, demographic shift, and the ongoing reckoning with how American cities were shaped by exclusion — these are not trends to track from a distance. They are the conditions under which every serious urban project must now be designed.
People enjoy a sunny day at a lively mixed-use urban community with shops, cafes, and green spaces.
A few directions are particularly significant:
Climate-responsive design is moving from a specialty consideration to a baseline expectation. Buildings and urban spaces that manage heat, water, and energy as part of their fundamental design logic — rather than as add-on systems — will define the next generation of urban architecture. For communities that bear disproportionate climate risk, this isn’t an aesthetic preference. It’s a survival question.
Mixed-use, transit-oriented development continues to demonstrate its value in cities serious about reducing car dependency and expanding affordable access to economic opportunity. The principles my 1982 thesis was built on are, if anything, more urgently relevant now than they were then.
Community co-design is slowly but genuinely gaining ground as a legitimate professional practice rather than a public relations exercise. The difference between consultation and co-design is meaningful: in co-design, the community shapes the program, not just responds to a pre-formed proposal. When architects commit to this approach, the results tend to be more durable, more used, and more valued.
The adaptive reuse of existing building stock — commercial, institutional, and industrial — offers one of the most compelling opportunities for urban community development in the years ahead. Converting underutilized assets into housing, community space, and mixed-use anchors is not only environmentally sound; it is a way of keeping communities rooted in the physical fabric of their own history.
The future of urban architecture will be shaped by whether the profession can hold these technical, social, and environmental imperatives together — and by whether the communities most affected by design decisions have genuine power in making them.
Ed Estes is the founder of edESTESdesign, a multi-disciplinary practice in architectural design, urban design, graphic design, and digital content design based in Prince George’s County, Maryland. He is also the Founder and Executive Director of the Hampton University Architecture Alumni Association (HUAAA) and a Hampton (Institute) University Class of 1982 alumnus.
A loosely circular driveway sweeps through the White House grounds, just below the beloved South Portico of the mansion. Its shape echoes a larger park, known as the Ellipse, which connects the president’s home to the National Mall. It also mirrors the curving pathways of nearby Lafayette Square, on the north side of the complex.
The simple symmetry of this modest roadway and the grace of the White House south grounds are no accident: They were the vision of the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., one of the original members of the Senate Park Commission, which created the monumental core of Washington as we know it, more than a century ago.
The geometry of this driveway — a small but resonant element of Olmsted’s master plan for the White House campus — will soon be erased, now that a federal judge has allowed President Donald Trump to proceed at least temporarily with construction of his 90,000-square-foot, $400 million ballroom. The ballroom, which will be larger than the original mansion, is so gargantuan that the original curving road simply won’t fit. To make room for Trump’s entertaining and fundraising space, a large notch will be clawed out of the driveway, according to drawings released by Shalom Baranes Associates, the D.C.-based architecture firm overseeing one of the most unpopular projects of the president’s second term.
A vintage aerial view of the White House grounds, looking east. (Library of Congress)
Washington has a composed geometry built up from significant details like this elliptical drive. As with the diagonal avenues that connect symbolically important circles, squares and civic landmarks, the Platonic perfection of this shape is best appreciated from the air. But it is a vital reminder of the care taken, over the past 200 years, in the design of the capital city, and the deference paid to a set of aesthetic and cultural values that came out of the Enlightenment, including a love of symmetry, repetition, iterative patterns and a fine balance between grandeur and grandiosity.
Trump is the most significant threat to the city’s architectural and design legacy since British forces burned the Capitol and White House during the War of 1812. He has already demolished the East Wing of the White House, which dates to the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He will replace it with a building that makes James Hoban’s neo-Classical executive mansion a mere appendage to a space meant to function like a hotel-convention-center-entertainment venue. He has proposed (but temporarily delayed) painting the next-door Eisenhower Executive Office Building a blinding shade of white, which preservation groups argue could irreversibly damage the stone facade.
President Donald Trump has proposed — but temporarily delayed — painting the Eisenhower Executive Office Building a blinding shade of white. (Al Drago/For The Washington Post)
He wants to build a 250-foot-tall memorial arch near the most hallowed ground in the country, Arlington National Cemetery. His “Independence Arch,” which he has said will honor himself personally, would dwarf the largest victory arches in the world, including the arch in Pyongyang, built in 1982 to honor North Korea’s murderous dictator, Kim Il Sung. Only Eero Saarinen’s slender ribbon of steel, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, would be taller. Although it would be built in a traffic circle on the Virginia side of the Potomac, the Trump arch would compete with some of the tallest buildings in Washington, including the Washington Monument and Washington National Cathedral, fundamentally altering a meticulously preserved skyline.
These proposals, the rush to realize them, the stacking of key oversight groups with Trump loyalists and flunkies and the collaboration of firms like Shalom Baranes Associates, have upended and effectively destroyed the process of design review — which has until now preserved Washington as a monumental, picturesque capital.
They would also manifest in stone, cement and steel a vision of the city fundamentally at odds with the democratic ideals of the city’s founders, the stewards of its expansion in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the vigilance of its latter-day defenders against shabby development, cheapness and commercialization.
An 1807 rendering of the White House, including proposed North and South porticos, later built with some minor changes. (Library of Congress)
In 1806, Benjamin Latrobe, perhaps the first great architect in America, sent a letter to Congress, defending his work on the U.S. Capitol, which was then under construction. Latrobe, who also contributed to the interiors of Hoban’s White House, was a proud and difficult man, and his letter to Congress, which exercises authority over the design of the nascent city — a duty it is now shirking — was prickly and defensive. But in it, he articulated foundational principles for the aesthetics and architecture of the new republic, which recognized no kings, and no absolute authority beyond the laws and the Constitution.
“Nothing appears so clear,” he wrote, “as that a graceful and refined simplicity is the highest achievement of taste and art.” American buildings should be “chaste and simple,” and to ornament them just for the sake of surface attraction was folly.
“We find ornaments increase in proportion as art declines, or as ignorance abounds,” he maintained.
This was the common language of American architecture at the time — stately, chaste, simple, dignified — and it echoed ideas from a half-century earlier, as capitalism and representational government were together forging a new, bourgeois worldview. In Adam Smith’s 1759 “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” the Scottish philosopher and economist sometimes called the Father of Capitalism wrote that two new aesthetics were in competition as the world industrialized and broke down the old, feudal orders.
One was based on greed, power and avidity; the other on equity, justice and humility. These values would express themselves in our political systems, our economies, our ethics, our art and our architecture.
Fresh dirt can be seen piled up in early March at East Potomac Golf Links, which has become a makeshift dumping ground for soil and debris from the East Wing of the White House. (Al Drago for The Washington Post)
“Two different models, two different pictures, are held out to us, according to which we may fashion our own character and behaviour,” he wrote. “The one more gaudy and glittering in its colouring; the other more correct and more exquisitely beautiful in its outline; the one forcing itself upon the notice of every wandering eye; the other, attracting the attention of scarce anybody but the most studious and careful observer.”
The elliptical drive at the White House, about to be disappeared by a gaudy new ballroom, was the exact sort of subtle detail that delighted the designers of early Washington, a pattern hidden in plain sight that would attract the attention of only “the most studious and careful observer.” The ballroom itself, which Trump has promoted as spectacular and ornate, exemplifies the aesthetic — and moral value system — that Smith found both dangerous and abhorrent.
How did we get here? How have we strayed or been misled so far from the values, ideals and aesthetics that gave Washington its current form?
Trump doesn’t have a coherent or consistent aesthetic ideal. Rather, the veteran real estate developer has reflexive responses and aesthetic tics when it comes to design — and for a president, an unprecedented willingness to assert them. Three of these habits are easy to see in his plans for Washington, mirroring his style of politics and his use of rhetoric and language. He has a primitive attraction to the big, the grand, the colossal. When he speaks, he uses superlatives reflexively, and he brings the same sensibility to architecture. And just as nature abhors a vacuum, Trump abhors anything he sees as empty. There is no value in silence, no beauty in open, uncluttered spaces. Everything must be filled, branded, made busy. Finally, he has no sense of context or formal relationships, no understanding of the hierarchies of how buildings (and institutions) relate to each other, to history, to formal plans.
The design of beautiful cities, and the design of effective governments, are predicated on “gentleman’s agreements,” voluntary deference to precedents and conventions. Trump respects none of this.
But there is a fourth deficiency in his understanding of architecture and design, which arises from and amplifies his other three failures of taste and judgment: He appears utterly uninterested in basic American values, history and symbols, and so there are no guardrails, no limits, to the damage done by his other failings.
Traffic crosses Arlington Memorial Bridge, close to where President Donald Trump wants to build a 250-foot-tall memorial arch. (Al Drago for The Washington Post)
Trump’s single-minded and unwavering preference for the biggest, his equating of size with significance, has become so familiar we have started to overlook it. But the architectural consequences for Washington will be devastating. When Stanford White — whose architecture firm McKim, Mead & White designed several branches of New York’s Public Library and the original Pennsylvania Station — drafted a memorial arch, he included in an 1892 rendering the figure of a man holding a measuring stick to offer a sense of its size. The arch, built in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park to honor the nation’s first president, rose to 77 feet, a bit taller than the ancient Roman Arch of Titus on which it was loosely modeled. But while grand and imposing, it still had a relationship to human scale.
Trump’s arch will dwarf this, and all other ancient precedents. Only the monuments erected by modern governments that rule by terror and dehumanization offer any comparable examples. And it is larger than many of those, too, dwarfing the Victory Arch in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang.
It will also fundamentally alter one of the essential elements of what is known as the McMillan Plan, the Senate Park Commission’s 1902 redesign of the capital city which created the National Mall and the monumental core of Washington. The McMillan Plan forged a grand, axial vision of national healing and reconciliation that symbolically reconnected the North and the South by a bridge across the Potomac, joining a city of the dead at Arlington Cemetery to the city of the living, with the Lincoln Memorial as a hinge point. Long vistas and clear views drew the eye from the memorial to the military architect of Civil War victory, Ulysses S. Grant, at the base of the U.S. Capitol, to the temple devoted to the political architect of reunification, Lincoln, more than two miles away. The men and women who sacrificed their lives for reunification were honored by the Arlington Memorial Bridge leading to the cemetery and low-lying hills of Virginia just beyond.
That open view across the Potomac River to the hallowedburial ground was essential. A winning design in an early competition for a bridge at that crossing included two massive arches over its central piers — small compared to Trump’s arch, but large enough to impede views. The leaders of the McMillan Plan not only rejected these arches, they took particular care to keep sight lines open and the design of the shallow, low-slung bridge (by McKim, Mead & White) simple and elegant. They also stripped away a complex plan for some 40 decorative sculptures. The closer they got to the final resting place of Civil War soldiers, the more the planners insisted on dignity, sobriety and simplicity.
To understand the true scale of Trump’s ballroom, you have to get beyond the mere size of its floor plan — at 90,000 square feet, almost twice as large as the original structure’s 55,000 square feet. Rather, you need to take into account the context of the White House grounds and the surrounding federal buildings. The scale of the addition will destroy any sense of symmetry between the East and West wings and reorient the White House campus to the east, where it faces the massive Treasury Department building, a dispiriting, fortresslike phalanx of Ionic columns that natter on like someone discoursing on the infallible wisdom of free markets. Renderings of the new structure make it look like the old White House mated with Treasury, spawning a grotesque creature that has traded the livability of a domestic space for the untrammeled power of a banking colossus.
Trump’s gilded arch, ballroom and his redesign of the Oval Office with incrustations of historically anachronistic gold ornament, introduce a fussiness and busyness into a Washington aesthetic that has generally favored the chaste and simple, at least when it comes to the profile of classical buildings. His hanging of banners — in many cases featuring gigantic portraits of himself — as well as projecting images onto the blank face of the city’s most sublime and minimalist structure, the Washington Monument, suggest a need to fill in blank space, animating planes that are meant to be spare and quiet. The ballroom isn’t simply too big, it is also too busy.
Like the news cycle, architectural and urban spaces are treated as mere voids, waiting to be filled with Trumpian noise. Once filled, he owns them, at least in his own mind. Once owned, they can be monetized, and it’s likely only a matter of time until advertising is projected onto the Washington Monument and other structures.
Visitors at Arlington National Cemetery look toward the Lincoln Memorial and downtown Washington. (Al Drago for The Washington Post)
All of this has consequences on a deeper, symbolic level. The ballroom reorients the White House to suggest that it is fundamentally responsive to economic rather than civic power, confirming visually what is too often the case politically: The executive serves the financial class first and foremost.
The triumphal arch will be placed on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, effectively crowning the South as the victor in the Civil War. That too reaffirms in visual terms what is too often the case in civic life: That the values of the Confederacy, including its deeply entrenched racism and violence, remain extraordinarily powerful in American culture. The gilding of the arch echoes the tinsel applied to American history through entrenched mythologies like the Lost Cause.
There is no final price tag on all of this, beyond a few figures floated by the president, who has said that his $400 million ballroom will be financed privately — by billionaire donors and corporations maintaining contracts with the federal government in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Some of the funding for the National Garden of American Heroes will come from siphoning money out of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. We may never know how much it all costs, or who curried favor by paying for it, or what conflict-of-interest lines were crossed.
But the larger, less tangible costs can be roughly tabulated. The Commission of Fine Arts, which was created in 1910 to oversee the design of the city and execute and protect the vision of the McMillan Plan, is now a toothless organization stacked with loyalists including some with no expertise in design or architecture — among them a 26-year-old White House aide who has served as the president’s executive assistant.
Design review is dead, and with it the values of simplicity, chastity and modesty celebrated by Latrobe and Smith. Washington is now subject to design by fiat, by whim, by executive orders, whether legal or not. Trump is moving quickly to introduce noise, disorder and incoherence into the design of the capital city. It will be a lot less beautiful. And people who live here and those who visit may not know why, but they will sense that disorder and incoherence and tune it out, like just more noise.
A biker rides past Arlington Memorial Bridge on the Virginia side of the Potomac River. (Al Drago for The Washington Post)
For me, the answer is my mother, Emellen Mitchell Estes. Long before I was designing urban spaces or serving as Mayor, she was the one who gave me the “zoning permits” to build imaginary cities in our backyard in Atlanta.
An educator at heart, Emellen was a graduate of two iconic HBCUs—Morris Brown College and Atlanta University, now known as Clark-Atlanta University. She served as a teacher and Principal in the Atlanta Public Schools during the segregated 50s, 60s, and 70s. Despite the challenges of the era, she and my father fostered my passion for art, architecture, and the performing arts.
A tribute to Emellen Mitchell Estes, a dedicated educator and mother, whose influence shaped a legacy in architecture and education.
She didn’t just teach me how to build; she taught me who I was. She shared our rich ancestral history and kept me grounded in faith at the historic Big Bethel AME Church on Auburn Avenue.
I am the architectural designer, urban planner, and graphic & web designer I am today because she believed in the blueprints of my imagination.
The Bradfield Development Authority has revealed the next major milestone in the creation of Australia’s first new city in more than a century, unveiling the master plan and concept design for Bradfield City’s First Land Release, known as Superlot 1.
by Clémence Carayol
Designed by Hassell and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), in collaboration with cultural design partners Djinjama and COLA Studio, the ambitious reference design establishes a new benchmark for sustainable, inclusive and future-focused urban development.
The precinct will serve as the physical and symbolic gateway to Bradfield City, setting the tone for its evolution as Western Sydney’s new urban heart.
“We set out to create a precinct where nature and urban life are intertwined, ensuring Bradfield City feels welcoming, sustainable and uniquely of its place,” says Kevin Lloyd, Principal, Hassell.
Delivered by the NSW Government alongside developer and investor Plenary, the First Land Release is envisioned as a vibrant, 24/7 mixed-use precinct that will catalyse investment, innovation and community life.
More than 1,400 new homes will be delivered, including 10 per cent dedicated to affordable housing, alongside commercial, retail and community spaces.
The precinct is strategically positioned within minutes of the new Metro station and the expansive Central Park, reinforcing Bradfield City’s role as a highly connected metropolitan centre.
At the core of the master plan is an ambition to create a place where transport connectivity, urban density and deep respect for Country coexist.
This vision is expressed through the ‘Green Loop’, a 15-metre-wide landscape spine that weaves Moore Gully’s natural systems through the built environment. Shaped by extensive First Nations engagement and informed by Country through cultural design partner Djinjama, the landscape and architecture feel intrinsically connected to place from the outset.
Anchoring the Green Loop is the Community Gathering Space, an intergenerational hub housed within a striking timber pavilion. Its woven canopy of interlocking timber reflects the Aboriginal principle of “Enoughness”, taking only what is needed, offering a sustainable prototype for learning, gathering and connection that exists in harmony with the loop’s water and biodiversity systems.
The precinct’s design prioritises permeability and movement. A fine-grained network of active streets and mid-block pathways promotes walkability, safety and vibrant street life. At ground level, public spaces, retail, lobbies and shared amenities activate street frontages, encouraging daily interaction and participation in community life.
As an economic and cultural anchor for the new city, the First Land Release will integrate a major education campus, a hotel and commercial office spaces, strategically clustered near the Metro to foster a thriving innovation hub.
A diverse housing mix — including student accommodation, affordable housing and market-rate apartments — ensures a truly intergenerational community from day one.
Bradfield City’s First Land Release represents a confident new model for city-making: one that celebrates Country, champions sustainability and innovation, and places community at its core, setting a powerful precedent for Sydney’s newest city.
“To design a new city is both a rare opportunity and a profound responsibility. Bradfield City is a chance to shape a vision with Country and community, embedding resilience, sustainability, and innovation into every layer of the city,” says Michael Powell, Senior Associate Principal, SOM.
Images: Bradfield City First Land Release / supplied
After years of discussion and debate, a team has been selected to redevelop the Chevy Chase Library and community center.
On Friday, Mayor Bowser announced that Rift Valley Partners was chosen from eight proposals to transform the properties at 5601 and 5625 Connecticut Avenue NW.
Rift Valley Partners’ plan calls for a 177-unit building that will include affordable, workforce, and market-rate housing, plus a new community center and library. The proposal also features outdoor elements such as an amphitheater, an outdoor classroom, multiple sports courts, and neighborhood retail. Studios Architecture is the project’s lead designer.
Redevelopment of the civic site has been a major community issue over the past two years, with most debate focused on the scope of development and the amount of affordable housing to be provided.
Architect Shalom Baranes has presented an updated, “more-graceful” design of the proposed White House ballroom and suggested adding a storey to the West Wing for symmetry.
The East Wing proposal will reach approximately 51 feet high (15.54 metres), while the ballroom will feature 30 to 40-foot high ceilings (nine to 12 metres), according to Baranes.
“A modest one-story addition to the West Wing colonnade”
Barane’s said that in the interest of symmetry, a second storey may be added to the West Wing colonnade to match the increased height of a proposed East Wing colonnade.
“This scheme does require a two-story colonnade, connecting the East Room in the White House to the new ballroom,” said Baranes. “We believe it’s appropriate to evaluate this condition within the context of the broader White House campus.”
“The White House is therefore considering the idea of a modest one-storey addition to the West Wing colonnade, which would serve to restore a sense of symmetry around the original central pavilion.”
The drawings show the “two-storey” colonnade running into the East Wing building from the White House. The East Wing building itself is wrapped in a classical arcade on its second storey, which covers eight large, arched windows that look into the ballroom.
A facade of smaller, rectangular windows is pictured below along the building’s first level. This lower, 89,000 square-foot level will contain auxiliary spaces to serve the ballroom and a new office for the First Lady, who traditionally holds an office in the East Wing.
It will also reportedly hold a movie theatre.
Multiple grand stairs will lead to the building, while visitors will be able to enter the building directly under two porticos, one which extends far into the White House lawn.
“Rationalising” the White House
Foyers are located on either level at the end of the colonnade, while the remaining program spreads forward into the length of the building.
The architect also said that the previous layout of the East Wing was “labyrinthian in character” and that the new scheme will serve to “rationalise” the building.
“One could generously describe the current functioning of the White House support areas, such as loading, waste handling, general deliveries and food service as being quite labyrinthian in character,” said Baranes. “And I think that’s a kind description.”
“The proposed re-modernisation seeks to rationalise these functions in a manner that will relieve the stress by increasing connectivity, operational efficiency and by enhancing overall security. The changes will allow the White House to be experienced and to age, I think, in a much more graceful way over time.”
NCPC Commissioner William Scharf also stressed the importance of the East Wing ballroom as a new space to host visiting dignitaries, as the current White House puts forth “not a good look for the United States”.
“I think it’s notable that when the President of the United States of America flies to the United Kingdom, he’s hosted at Windsor Castle,” said Scharf.
“And when next year, the king of the United Kingdom, Great Britain and Northern Ireland, comes to the United States, more likely than not he will be hosted in a tent on the South Lawn with porta-potties. That, to me, is not a good look for the United States of America.”
“Disturbing”, said commissioner
“There is a real programmatic need for a building like this.”
The proposed East Wing building will sit in the same footprint as the McCrery Architects proposals, as the location and placement is ideal for access from the East Room, according to Baranes, who said he and McCrary Architects both studied the site “fairly extensively”.
He also said that while there’s “been excavation work” and “some foundation work”, the scheme “all depends on schedule and money” as it’s further refined.
DC Council Chairman Phil Mendelson pushed back on the building’s proposed size, calling it “disturbing” and “overwhelming”. Others expressed concerns over safety, clearance design and ADA accessibility, while a delegate for the Department of the Interior said it supports the plan with “no reservations”.
A “more detailed and fully developed submission” is set to be proposed at a February NCPC meeting.
A plan is in the works to give a boost to the struggling H Street Corridor.
DC’s Office of Planning (OP) along with the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development has picked architecture firm Torti Gallas to conduct a land use and market study for the corridor that saw a huge development boom between 2010 and 2018.
The study will focus on the stretch between 3rd Street NE and 15th Street NE, examining market trends and the possibility for more development and public realm improvements. Torti Gallas will be tasked with “creating an economic development strategy that promotes a vibrant mix of retail and housing while enhancing the pedestrian experience along this significant transit corridor,” according to OP.
The H Street Corridor has encountered significant headwinds in the post-pandemic world. A 2023 article in the Washington Post outlined how increased crime in the area was resulting in a sense of unease among residents, and a number of neighborhood establishments closed as a result. The streetcar, that opened to significant fanfare in 2016, will shut down at the end of March.
As we celebrate this festive season, I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude for your continued support and collaboration throughout the year.
In this past year, I have had the pleasure of working on innovative architectural designs, thoughtful urban planning projects, creative graphic designs, and dynamic web solutions—all made possible by your trust in me.
May this Christmas bring you peace, joy, and wonderful moments with your loved ones. I look forward to continuing our partnership in the New Year and bringing your visions to life.
