Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
that would also provide excellent defenses in the event of foreign attack or
domestic hostilities. Located midway between Maine and Georgia astride a
river that penetrated deep into the interior of the eastern seaboard, the pro-
posed capital would theoretically help unite the North and the South while
forging a vital link to future inland states. While some objected to placing
the nation's capital in an unpopulated “wilderness,” others argued that,
because it was free of the moral vices, public health disorders, and political
corruption associated with large cities, the sparsely settled region offered a
stable and virtuous location for the capital of a democratic nation. Located
near the head of navigation on the Potomac River, with a vast source of
potential water power near at hand at Great Falls, the proposed city seemed
ideally situated to fulfill its destiny as a political, commercial, and industrial
center.
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Once a site had been chosen, the next step was to develop a plan for
transforming the fields, woods, marshes, and streams that skeptics derided as
a swamp in the midst of a wilderness into a capital city that would be—in
an oft-repeated phrase—“worthy of the nation.”The man assigned this task
was Pierre Charles L'Enfant, a French-trained military engineer who had
gained a modicum of renown for his role in remodeling New York's city
hall as the temporary headquarters of the federal government. L'Enfant's
plan for the nation's capital was a bold invention. Rather than develop a
modest agrarian-scale town as Jefferson and other skeptics advised, L'Enfant
called for an impressive urban edifice expressing the young nation's grand
aspirations through ostentatious formal and symbolic gestures. Drawing
heavily on his boyhood familiarity with the Baroque splendor of grand
European designs, L'Enfant proposed a highly stylized urban geometry of
sweeping diagonals superimposed on an underlying grid.This composition
was anchored by strong axial relationships formed by grand avenues
extending from the president's house and the seat of Congress, which inter-
sected at the site of what would eventually become the Washington Mon-
ument. Lesser monuments and public buildings would occupy smaller
squares and circles at the intersections of the diagonal avenues and major
streets. The visual grandeur afforded by these sweeping vistas and harmo-
nious geometric arrangements was heightened by the political symbolism
underlying the design. L'Enfant's bold reinterpretation of the site was not
just an exercise in formal composition; it was an attempt to inscribe the
American political system into the raw landscape of the Potomac shoreline.
The distant but equitable relationship between the president's house and
