Postmodernism Architecture Tour

Courtesy of Flickr user NCinDC

NAME: Bank & Office Building
LOCATION: 29th & M Street NW
ARCHITECT: Martin and Jones
COMPLETED: c. 1980

• One of the earliest examples of a building in D.C. exhbiting postmodernist aesthetic philosophy and compositional tactics
• Classical/neoclassical elements—columns, entablature, fan windows—are applied or inserted in a wholly cosmetic, fragmentary way
• Yet the building's overall massing and fenestration is clearly modernist in its abstract, asymmetrical geometric composition

NAME: Office Building
LOCATION: 1718 Connecticut Avenue NW
ARCHITECT: David M. Schwarz/Architectural Services
COMPLETED: c. 1982

• This late 20th century commercial building looks like its inspiration might have been some Romanesque civic edifice or perhaps an Italianesque palazzo from another century - until you look at the rear facade, which looks nothing like the street facade
• Arches, brick facades with punched windows varying in size, precast lintels and gables, and towers create an image—looking from the street—of mass and weight, as if thick, load-bearing walls were the building's structural support, which they are not
• Despite looking like something it isn't, the building respects the Connecticut Avenue streetscape in its overall massing

NAME: Office Building
LOCATION: 1777 F Street NW
ARCHITECT: Skidmore Owings & Merrill
COMPLETED: c. 1982

• Appearances can be deceiving—this looks like a 1970s vintage, ribbon-windowed office building tucked behind preserved, 19th century, Victorian-era townhouses, but in fact the ensemble is a single office building
• The townhouses at the corner facing F Street are really just a pseudo-facade tacked on to the office building behind and meant to approximate the appearance of the original townhouses which previously were demolished
• Closer inspection of the pseudo-townhouses—inauthentic materials, entry doorway sills abutting the sidewalk, awkward details, unsightly connections to the glass and precast concrete structure behind—reveals the sham

Courtesy of AgnosticPreachersKid on Wikimedia Commons

NAME: Army-Navy Club
LOCATION: Farragut Square NW
ARCHITECT: Shalom Baranes Associates
COMPLETED: c. 1985

• This project entailed vertical expansion and enlargement of a historic, multi-story, traditionally styled institutional building, always a challenging preservation task and always posing a key question—should an addition relate to the original by aesthetic analogy or aesthetic contrast?
• The architect chose analogy; thus the addition is derivative of and echoes the original Army-Navy Club's brick cladding, beige and brown color palette, fenestration patterns and ornamental details
• Glance at the enlarged building and it looks compositionally unified, but examine it more carefully and you see the original building along with odd collisions and details where new meets old—from some vantage points, it even seems like the original building is being absorbed into another, larger building