Welcome Back, DCist! A Look at Steven Holl Architects’ Kennedy Center Expansion

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by Deane

The roof of the REACH will be planted as part of an additional 130,000 square feet of green space in the Kennedy Center expansion.

Local news site DCist relaunched today after a little more than six months of hiatus. I’m pleased to have contributed a piece on the Kennedy Center’s expansion—an ambitious, 72,000-square-foot addition to the performing arts campus designed by Steven Holl Architects—to the latest incarnation of DCist.

An excerpt from the piece is below, but be sure to click through for the full story as well as the rest of the glorious comeback coverage featured on DCist:

“Ginkgoes are an amazing tree,” architect Steven Holl explained at a recent construction tour of the center. “In the fall, they get these golden colors that hang on the trees through the month of November. I have three ginkgo trees that I’ve planted, and I’ve witnessed this, where, in November, suddenly all the leaves decide to fall. I’m hoping that it could happen here on the 22nd of November, which is that fateful day of Kennedy’s removal from the face of the earth. Anyway, that is going to be a beautiful grove. When the leaves drop, it’s like a golden carpet below the trees.”

At last week’s tour, Holl, the founder of Steven Holl Architects, bordered on the lyrical in describing his firm’s work as curving tips of an iceberg connected beneath the surface and likening movement between aboveground and underground spaces to a violinist’s glissando, the slide between two notes.

“Most of the curves are about the connectivity of the underground to these three river pavilions above. That same curve goes all the way down,” Holl said. The expansion will open on September 7, 2019.

Read the full story at DCist. Thankfully, DCist’s active comment community seems to continue to thrive. It should be noted that the ginkgo trees mentioned above, which will be planted at the expansion, are all male trees, i.e., the non-stinky-fruit-bearing kind.  

Sneak Peek of Thomas Phifer’s Glenstone Expansion

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by Deane
The Pavilions at Glenstone, by Thomas Phifer and Partners with PWP Landscape Architecture | © Deane Madsen

The Pavilions at Glenstone, by Thomas Phifer and Partners with PWP Landscape Architecture | © Deane Madsen

The Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Md., opened its doors to visitors for a preview of its latest exhibition,“Louise Bourgeois: To Unravel a Torment,” and a walking tour of its expansion. The expansion, designed byThomas Phifer and Partners with PWP Landscape Architecture, will open in October. 

The Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Md., was abuzz with activity during a recent press preview for its latest exhibition, “Louise Bourgeois: To Unravel a Torment,” which opened May 10, not least because visitors were also offered a brief walkthrough of the museum’s significant expansion, which is set to open October 4.

Glenstone may be one of the greater Washington area’s best-kept secrets, but expect that to change this fall. The museum opened the doors of its original 30,000-square-foot museum, designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, in 2006. Since then, Glenstone has grown its undulating landscape, swelling from 100 acres to 230 acres and becoming a pastoral backdrop for large-scale outdoor sculptures from artists that include Richard Serra, Ellsworth Kelly, Jeff Koons, and Janet Cardiff with George Bures Miller.

The museum has also outgrown the 9,000 square feet of gallery space of its Gwathmey Siegel–designed facilities, prompting a dramatic expansion at the hands of Thomas Phifer and Partners with PWP Landscape Architecture, which adds 50,000 square feet of gallery space—along with an arrival center, two cafés, and storage and administrative spaces that bring the total addition to 240,000 square feet—in a cluster of variable-sized concrete boxes dubbed “the Pavilions.”

Read the full story at Architectural Record. 

Louise Bourgeios's "Cells" series includes intimate rooms constructed of found objects. | © Deane Madsen

Louise Bourgeios’s “Cells” series includes intimate rooms constructed of found objects. | © Deane Madsen

Secret Cities Exhibition Preview in Metropolis Magazine

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by Deane
Secret Cities exhibition at the National Building Museum | © Deane Madsen

Secret Cities exhibition at the National Building Museum | © Deane Madsen

If you’ve never heard of Los Alamos, New Mexico; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; or Hanford and Richland, Washington, you’re not alone. In fact, the clandestine nature of these places is by design. But the upcoming exhibition Secret Cities: The Architecture and Planning of the Manhattan Project, opening May 3 at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., aims to reveal much of their history and built forms.

As part of the U.S. war effort in the early 1940s, the federal government built facilities for the development and testing of atomic weapons. Alongside these, it also constructed housing for the involved scientists and technicians in semi-urban communities as secretive as their work.

Read the full story at Metropolis Magazine. “Secret Cities” runs May 3, 2018—March 3, 2019 at the National Building Museum.

The Watergate in Black and White

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by Deane
Watergate at dusk

The Watergate Complex at dusk | © Deane Madsen

It was my great honor to photograph The Watergate in grainy detail for a photo essay to accompany a long-form piece by Rachel Kurzius for Curbed entitled “Watergate is a place, too.” For this assignment, I carried both my 35mm Nikkormat camera and my digital Nikon D5000—just to be safe—but the images on film turned out just fine, despite weather complications in the form of scattered thunderstorms and winds gusting above 40 knots off the Potomac.

Garden enclosed by the Watergate | © Deane Madsen

Garden enclosed by the Watergate | © Deane Madsen

After parking beneath the Watergate, where the waffle slab ceiling is glorious but dimly illuminated, I walked all around the Watergate’s grounds, looking for signs of life, interesting details, and unexpected angles. The Watergate Hotel offers supreme views into the ground-level courtyard with the Washington Monument just one of many landmarks visible in the city’s backdrop. The roof terrace of the Kennedy Center, which neighbors the Watergate complex to the south, likewise afforded decent views back toward the complex, though it was here that the weather was at its most severe.

View of the Watergate complex across the Potomac River from Roosevelt Island | © Deane Madsen

View of the Watergate complex across the Potomac River from Roosevelt Island | © Deane Madsen

In between thunderstorms, I drove out to Roosevelt Island, and walked around its northeastern shoreline looking for a vantage point from which to shoot the Watergate over the Potomac. Low tree branches obscured most direct views, but I continued until I found a relatively unobstructed view back.

A lone pedestrian walks the lower level of the Watergate | © Deane Madsen

A lone pedestrian walks the lower level of the Watergate | © Deane Madsen

Perhaps because of the inclement weather, there were few people out and about during my shooting days (I did return the next day for a chance at clearer skies), but the effect is one of eerie tranquility. I owe a debt to many architectural photographers that have preceded me, notably Ezra Stoller and Simon Phipps, both of whom have made photographs that emphasize form, materiality, and play of light.

The Watergate's distinctive toothlike balcony stalagmites provide add rhythm to the buildings' rounded forms | © Deane Madsen

The Watergate’s distinctive toothlike balcony stalagmites provide add rhythm to the buildings’ rounded forms | © Deane Madsen

Read the fascinating full story at Curbed. 

‘Evicted’ Opens at the National Building Museum

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by Deane
Eviction notices welcome visitors to an exhibition at the National Building Museum | © Deane Madsen

Eviction notices welcome visitors to an exhibition at the National Building Museum | © Deane Madsen

What happens when one’s home is taken away? That’s a question that far too many people have had to ask themselves when faced with eviction, and one that looms in “Evicted,” a new exhibition at Washington, D.C.’s National Building Museum.

“We now know from looking at 80 million eviction records from across the country that in 2016, 2.3 million people were touched by eviction,” says sociologist Matthew Desmond, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City serves as the prompt for the exhibition by the same title. “Evicted” tells the stories of those who have returned home to find all of their personal belongings stacked curbside—or, worse still, shrink-wrapped and carted away to a bonded storage warehouse. It  shows the courtrooms where landlords appear with their lawyers, and former tenants often don’t show up, knowing that their failure to pay rent has decided their cases whether they appear or not. The exhibition maps eviction data, proving it to be not just a local or regional problem, but a nationwide epidemic that, as Desmond explains, is as much a cause of poverty as it is a result of it. “This is a problem that is affecting the streets of communities all across the country,” he says. “Through our work at the Eviction Lab, a Princeton University–based team that researches evictions in America], we’ve been able to see this, and take a problem that’s been invisible and bring it to light, and literally put it on the map.”

The map to which Desmond refers covers the first wall of the exhibition with moving boxes scaled according to the number of evictions per state, painting a tangible picture of just how widespread eviction has become in America. “You can see the weight of this problem at a national level that we were never able to before,” Desmond says. “For me, housing should be a right for everyone who lives in this country. It should be part of what it means to be an American, because without it, everything else falls apart.”

Read the full story at Architectural Record. 

A visitor walks through "Evicted" at the National Building Museum | © Deane Madsen

A visitor walks through “Evicted” at the National Building Museum | © Deane Madsen

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