Thesis project completed in Fall 2007/Spring 2008 at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Advisor: Timothy Hyde.
Many of the ideas addressed by this project were worked out by writing a weblog about architecture, democracy, and America.
In addition to the bits above, this project was presented with an animation. View the full animation here
See what other people are saying about this project:
Geoff Manaugh, senior editor at Dwell and blogger extraordinaire of BLDGBLOG. Todd Zwillich, host of Power Breakfast on WAMU 88.5 Washington DC's NPR station. Boingboing, the popular news site. Stuart Candy, a Future Studies PhD student at the University of Hawaii. Matt Jones, Entrepreneur and Interaction Designer. Pop Tech Blog, a conference about science, technology, and the future of ideas. Javier Arbona, PhD Student in Geography at UC Berkeley.History Bites Back
To begin we need to transport ourselves back to September 5th, 1774 where the Continental Congress has assembled in Philadelphia to begin the American experiment. John Adam's recorded in his diary of that evening the following statement which describes the very first moments, and the very first decision that our Congress ever made:
"The members met at the City Tavern at ten o'clock and walked to the Carpenter's Hall, where they took a view of the chamber. The general cry was that this was a Good Room. And the question was put whether we were satisfied with this Room?"
In other words, the very first act of congress as a deliberative body was an act of architectural evaluation. This spirit of engagement with the built environment would continue with an open competition held to design the Capitol Building in 1792. Although the intention was to have the Capitol completed for 1800, the difficulties of constructing one of the nascent country's largest buildings in what was basically still a swamp were overwhelming. In 1800 the US capitol was little more than a half-built stone cube. Through incremental construction, destruction, and reconstruction the Congress continually took up questions of judgement in regards to the architecture of their home.
By 1826 the building had congealed into something we can more or less recognize as the US Capitol but this proved satisfactory for only 25 years. It would prove to be too small for a rapidly expanding country (and thus an expanding legislature). A second competition was held and the result of that competition was the large building as we know it today featuring a 300' tall dome. In the decision making process during this competition we can see some glimmer of the architectural failure that was lurking at the capitol. Due to the building's subscription to the rules of neo-classicism it was considered appropriate that expansion happen in a symmetrical fashion so that the dome stay centered on top of the building mass. However, the building's location on the edge of Jenkin's heights would mean that any expansion to the west required massive foundation walls that gave the building an un-democratic presence on the mall.
In 1863 when the dome was topped out, the nation was composed of 35 states with a total of 243 representatives meeting in Congress. By 1911 the number of representatives had ballooned to 435 and the expanded Capitol building was filled to the brim: more room was needed but the Capitol was in an architectural predicament. Hemmed in by the topography of Capitol Hill; restricted by the rules of classicism that required symmetry and centrality; and fearful of altering what had become an icon, Congress decided to cap the number of representatives at 435 rather than facing the realization that their "good room" was perhaps not so good anymore. Today we still suffer the consequences of this decision in the ongoing apportionment and gerrymandering debates.
In other words, the outwardly representative character of the capitol had become impossible to resolve with the internal machinery of the act of political representation and so the Capitol itself bloomed into a complex. At first it was 3 buildings but this quickly grew into a Hydra covering capitol hill with a network of 10 buildings totaling somewhere around 8 million square feet all connected by private subways.
We can now agree to two things: first, that it once was important, architecture is no longer understood as part of the political process by our policy makers themselves, and two, that in light of the frozen house of representatives at 435 members the existing capitol building which used to satisfy the "good room" question can no longer be considered a good room.
The Problem At Hand
What are the contemporary representational logics that could open up possibilities for re-addressing this "good room" question. We must now turn our attention to the Mall. Designed as a spine dotted with ceremonial buildings aligned in a beaux arts axis, the main axis was full of stuff by the 80s when Maya Lin won the Vietnam memorial competition. Her project, which sits outside of that axis, opened a new way of thinking about the multitudinous ceremonial relationships of the city by relying on sight lines and perceptual connections rather than conceptual axes.
One of the key issues in this project is finding a way to separate the outwardly representative function of the building from its policy making functions so that these two are no longer forced to compete for our favor. The Capitol is one building in which we cannot favor its roles as representative image over its role as representational engine or vice versa-- we have to have it both ways.
By accepting the city as a network of representational elements linked by their perceptual overlaps and the phenomena of parallax, we evacuate the centerpoint of L'Enfant's converging axes without adversely effecting the city's representational character so long as we maintain a key view down each of those axes. With this understanding the Capitol building itself becomes yet another node in a representational network that links the key institutions of the country as they are symbolically instantiated through the medium of washington, DC.
Symbols
It's important to note that on the same day the declaration of independence was signed, a committee was formed to design the Great Seal of the US which would later be adapted to form the Seal of congress as well. By using the symbology from the US Seal, the Capitol expresses its position as a key actor in the balanced separation of powers by using the building skin to engage in a building-to-building or institutional exchange at the scale of the city. To the pentagon goes the olive branch; to union station, the symbolic heart of the public in DC goes an abstracted fasci, symbol of unity; and to the White House, which has broadly overstepped its rightful position of balanced power, the most coherent image of the seal is broadcast as a message to keep its distance. Political integrity literalized in the form of a graphic construction contingent on the specific site of these respective institutions. From the key buildings-cum-institutions the images on the building skin are anamorphically coherent. From everywhere else in the city, the parallactically jumbled, frothy graphics of the building express the constructed, vulnerable nature of the institution of Congress.
The extreme scale of this facade is a direct response to the vastness of Washington, DC's ceremonial spaces. It is a city forced every day back into the two dimensional through the flash bulbs of its millions of visitors. As a city-machine constructed for the explicit purpose of viewing and celebrating the government, DC is as much alive in tourist photographs and other ephemeral representations as it is in terms of lived experience. Mega graphics, then, simultaneously reinforce and undermine that phenomena: the city-machine is grandiose, coherent, and symbolic from particular vantages. From all other points in the fractured, jumbled imagery of the building acknowledges the fragility of the political economy and emphasizes its construction as an explicit act.
Foam
Indeed, Foam as a metaphor for the multitudes, a specifically contemporary mode of subjectivity put forth by Peter Sloterdijk in which part to whole relationships in society are ambiguous, is how I would like to think of the society that this building serves and, indeed, the design of building itself takes cues from a foamy way of thinking. My intent is to re-engage the "good room" conversation by ensuring that the spaces of the building, especially the meeting chambers, are highly differentiated... that they proliferate the burden of choice. In this way the building is acting as a foam, a cluster of spatial bubbles acted upon by the dual forces of surface tension (the representative) and air pressure (the functional and programmatic requirements of representation).
As a scheme that is expansive in both plan and section, the Congressional population is split into primary members (Senators/Representatives), committee experts, and public visitors, distributed such that they all converge on the meeting chambers now located at the very heart of the building.
Circulation within the building is focused around a large interior plaza that acts as an extension of the National Mall and a programmatic connector for the Capitol. Hovering in the center of this plaza is a rock containing all of the meeting chambers for both Congressional bodies and all of their committees. As a foamy mix of spaces, the rock contains a variety of rooms from short to tall, big to small, and orthogonal to oblique that become an ad-hoc territory of decision making. Preceding politics there is always architecture.