Location Taken: Washington DC
Date Taken: October 2008
Did you know one of the DC Metro stations has its entrance under a building?
The Federal Triangle Metro Station comes out under the Ariel Rios building, home of the Environmental Protection Agency. That was a lot of capitalization. At least I didn’t got acronym crazy like I could have.
It’s a lovely building, so instead of leaving the pillared area housing the exit for the station via the normal route (straight out to the street), I instead walked through the building in the direction I was heading, which was south to the Smithsonian. You can see the National Museum of American History through the arch in this picture. It was undergoing renovation at the time, so there were fences and the standard sort of construction stuff all around it. I was heading to the building next to it, the National Museum of Natural History. I know, me, go to a museum focusing on science and all the other awesome history they lump into “Natural”? Never. Ok, more like, often.
Washington DC is a bit of an odd city. For one thing, there are no tall buildings. The tallest thing in the city is the Washington Monument, and that’s quite deliberate. The downtown areas are full of pillars and domes and white marble in a blatant imitation of the Romans. Mind you, the Romans actually painted their buildings and statues rather than leave them white. The paint just had all flaked off by the time people started idealizing the Romans, a trend which was in full swing in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s – right at the time Washington DC was being planned. I mean, when people are building houses that look like a broken Roman column or having parties where everyone dressed up in togas or as pillars or whatever they thought was properly “Roman”. (I learned that in my Art History classes. I had an awesome Art History teacher.) So Washington DC, as well as a lot of other cities built during that time, ended up full of white columns, imitating a false idea of Roman ideals. Here’s a comic that shows the concept far better than I can, even if they didn’t realize that it was older than the Victorians.
Makes me wonder what future people will think of us based on our architecture, and how much of what we’re making will last properly. Modern architecture is more likely to build something slated to last 100 years rather than 1000 years, after all. So who knows what the famous cities will look like in 500 years, when all our stuff is as old as the Renaissance is to us. The neo-Roman cities like DC probably will have weathered the time (though they may not have weathered us humans) since, even if they got certain facts wrong, they are at least based off of buildings that stuck around to one degree or another for millenia. Pretty good track record, if I say so myself.
