All images from Google Street View.

While attending yesterday’s Urbanexus lecture by Harriet Tregoning, I listened to an exchange between Tregoning and an audience member about “design excellence” in Washington’s downtown architecture. The audience member questioned why downtown architecture isn’t better. The implication in the discussion was that Washington is a stodgy, conservative city that would be oh so much better if only it embraced contemporary here and now architecture, and if only our height limit weren’t around to constrain creativity.

But if Washington has an architecturally stodgy downtown, is it really the fault of the architectural conservatives? When I compare office buildings constructed over the last couple of decades, it seems to me we did a lot better in the 1990s, under influences that would be considered more conservative, than we’re doing now. In the 90s it didn’t matter that we had a height limit, architects found ways to make buildings interesting using crowns, distinct corners, spires, and a whole host of other traditional tricks that relied on details and ornament. If the buildings they produced weren’t exactly going to be major international landmarks, they were at least interesting and generally attractive.

But since the 90s, the world of so-called “cutting edge” architecture has more or less abandoned such ornament and adopted a more retro Meisian modernist aesthetic, resulting in the re-emergence of blank glass boxes as the high end of design. Instead of buildings like the two at top right, lately we’ve been getting more buildings like the two at bottom. Seems worse to me, not better.

Of course there are exceptions; not all the 90s buildings were as interesting as those pictured, nor are all the contemporary ones as plain (or “sleek” in the parlance of their supporters), but the question remains: How can we trust an architectural establishment to produce excellent contemporary buildings when “more contemporary” seems to be code for “more boxy”? If downtown’s architecture is stodgy, why in the world should we put our trust for recovery in with designers who want more glass curtain walls? If “faux classical” is such an awful thing, why is “faux Meisian” OK?

I’m all for a more interesting downtown, but don’t trust the modernist crowd to get us there. Not one bit.