The Genius Design of Washington D.C.

You keep claiming that Washington's design is "car centric," even though the city was designed a century before the first cars were built. It's more accurate to say that the city's design adapted easily to cars, because of the wide streets and avenues it incorporated. Washington' has this in common with many other American cities.

Not just the street grid design, but the design of the DC Metro system, especially downtown, is incredible! The flashing lights on the platform whenever a train arrives, the hexagonal tiles, the waffle-style concrete vault Brutalism, it was built as a showcase system, and it shows. They were designed by Harry Weese, and he worked with Massachusetts-based lighting designer Bill Lam on the indirect lighting used throughout the system. He visited London, Paris, Rome, Stockholm, and many other smaller cities, hoping to take the best elements of each and combine them into the perfect system for DC. Weese created a proposal with dozens of views for station interiors with a simple semiellipse, with a flat bottom and curved top. For cut-and-cover stations, the vault was proposed to have straight, vertical walls supporting a curved ceiling. But the CFA wanted it to be beautiful, and no exposed rock walls like Stockholm, so he changed his thought. He felt the necessities of each station would produce the variety, that "You don't try to make them different for different's sake. We think it's very appropriate for Washington. After all". To Weese, the sweeping, swooping, floating lines of Metro's plazas, stations and mezzanines are the system's best feature. Once they were chosen, he said, the long, long escalators and the indirect, somewhat dim lighting in stations fell into step as a result.

As a DC resident I can tell you it works fairly well in the older, flatter downtown areas. Once you get farther afield and into actual geography of hills and creeks the system breaks down making it very difficult to get east to west. Further complicating the system was the disastrous attempt to put interstate highways through the city, which were only partially completed before residents revolted leaving partial highways that cut off sections of town and do not simplify auto transportation as intended.

Washington DC is one of my favourite cities in the world. I wish the McMillan plan was fully built out though because I loved it’s architecture

I’ll disagree with the car traffic thing a little. Sure traffic can be bad, but the city has pretty good public transit and hike infrastructure, so it’s not that bad

Brasilia's Plano Piloto was designed in the 50s by Lucio Costa and has many references, obviously! However, it is a city recognized for being an icon of the international modern movement in the last century and is much more related to the urban and architecture ideas of that time (CIAM, or Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne). It was not designed to be like a colonial city. (+ 4:18 that is not the monumental axis, so maybe it is not so clear) Dito isso, Washington D.C. é uma belíssima e fascinante cidade!

There weren't a lot of cars in 1792 when the city was designed so I'm going to hazard a guess that cars had nothing to do with the width of the streets. Also, the design of the city was modeled after Paris, which means the other cities were also based on Paris, not DC.

Washington D.C.'s 1791 L’Enfant layout is a derivative of the common 17th-18th century European formal style, which itself derives from Italian Renaissance gardens (notable for their parterres, diagonal avenues, central vistas, focal points, staircases, and fountains). These were translated through French and Dutch formal gardens of the mid-17th century, and adopted across the Continent as the basis for town and city planning. A reflection of this influence can be seen most prominently at Versailles, and also in the 1797 map of Paris from the Napoleonic period, with some limited use of parterres and avenues breaking up the otherwise mediaeval layout. That said, it was really only with Georges-Eugène Hausmann in 1853-1870, that Paris achieved its modern appearance, and the French capital is thus a more recent iteration of the style than Washington D.C. is. An earlier example of this style being used to plan a major city is Sir Christopher Wren's 1666 design for the City of London, following the Great Fire, which was ultimately never built. Unlike autocratic France, England was already a parliamentary democracy with property rights enshrined in the common law, preventing the relatively powerless King Charles II from razing private houses for such a grand ‘Hausmannian’ plan. Consequently, the City was rebuilt on its mediaeval street plan, with citizens staking out their plots amongst the rubble and rebuilding in situ. Nevertheless, the 1666 plan for London has many common features with the D.C. plan of a little over a century later, as well as with the 1853 Paris plan: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sir_Christopher_Wren%27s_plan_of_London_as_reproduced_by_Gwynn._Wellcome_M0003248.jpg; see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Charles_L%27Enfant#/media/File:Plan_of_the_city_intended_for_the_permanent_seat_of_the_government_of_the_United_States_-_projected_agreeable_to_the_direction_of_the_President_of_the_United_States..._(14726320702).jpg; and https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/1797_Jean_Map_of_Paris_and_the_Faubourgs%2C_France_-_Geographicus_-_Paris-jean-1797.jpg.

4:40 As a Brazilian, we were always told Brasília's design was actually meant to look like an airplane, I've never heard anyone mention Washington D.C. as an inspiration for that.

The design of Albany's Empire State Plaza is similar in design to the National Mall as well, though officially it was modeled after Brasília, Versailles, and India's Chandigarh. Empire State Plaza was the idea of Governor Nelson Rockefeller in the 1960s, who was inspired to create the complex after Queen Juliana of the Netherlands visited Albany for a celebration of the area's Dutch history. The plaza's massive scale was designed to look menacing on purpose so it could be the dominating feature seen from the Hudson River. It was designed by Wallace Harrison, who also worked on Rockefeller Center, the United Nations Headquarters and the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center. The NY State Capitol itself is quite cool. It was built between 1867 and 1899. Three teams of architects worked on the design of the Capitol during the 32 years of its construction which were Thomas Fuller (from 1867 to 1875), Leopold Eidlitz and Henry Hobson Richardson (1875 to 1883), and Isaac G. Perry (1883 to 1899). Thomas Fuller was the same guy who designed the buildings of Parliament Hill in Ottawa! As the result of the different architects, the state capitol is in different styles throughout including Romanesque and French Renaissance. Inside are 25 murals created by William de Leftwich Dodge that depict everything from Samuel de Champlain to New York troops serving in World War I.

The thing that truly sets DC apart from other American cities is it’s fantastic public transportation and mid-rise high-density urban design. It’s clearly very much inspired by Paris and does a very decent job functioning like it.

you realised when Washingston DC was created, there were no cars. the wide avenue ain't for cars. they are for army. in event of riots or wars, the wide avenue make it easy for the army to retain control of the city.

Our central square is Kim Il-sung Square, which is where military parades are held for national holidays. It is the "kilometer zero" of the DPRK from where all national road distances are measured. It is similar in form and design to the Tiananmen Square in Beijing and is used for the same purposes. It is architecturally more refined with its dramatic riverside setting. By observing, the Juche Tower appears to be located directly towards the west end of the square, although it is actually across the Taedong. The biggest building of the square is the Great People's Study House which houses 30 million books and was built as the "center for the project of intellectualizing the whole of society and a sanctuary of learning for the entire people." Our Juche Tower rivals the Washington Monument. Our Juche Tower measures 558 feet/170 m while the Washington Monument measures 555 feet/169 m. It opened in 1982 to commemorate my grandpa's seventieth birthday. It contains 25,550 blocks, one block for each day of my grandpa's life up until that point. And it serves as the backdrop for our holiday firework shows

Traffic in DC is heavy as the suburbs around the city have grown. But getting around is not a problem because even before the current subway system was completed there was a great bus transportation system that served the whole city. In addition, the city is very easy to navigate because of the street naming system employed and the fact that the city is divided into four segments that are marked by North, South, East and West . Streets are named starting at the center of the city by alphabet for north and south directions starting with "A" ,and then with the names of individuals, then with the names of flowers. And then streets are numbered for east and west directions.

nicely planned & constructed Washington DC # 👍🇵🇰

I just toured the east coast and D.C. was a very beautiful city!

You claim the roads were designed for cars, but they weren’t. The plan and road layouts predate cars by almost more than a century. The wide boulevards and how they exist now have more to do with the McMillan Commission and the City Beautiful Movement than cars.

Benjamin Benneker , an African American mathematician/astronomer, also had a large role in the design the city

the Australian Capital city was also inspired by Washington DC.

One of my favorite things about DC, is when you are downtown, it is not really that easy to get lost. Even for someone from out of town. The streets are labelled video clearly. The eastern border of DC for example is called Eastern AVE. The streets are also divided into 4 sections depending on where you are in the city. For example, if you are North West of the capitol building, all of the streets will have "NW" after their names. The same goes for NE, SE, and SW. Lastly, the streets have very easy names to remember. They are named after states, letters and numbers. For example, Michigan AVE NE (one that I drive on almost every week), and K ST NW (I remember this because of this is where the Apple Store is 😂).