Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and preserve public and private examples of “designed” nature throughout
the city. Many neglected parks were refurbished, and the National Gallery
of Art created a picturesque sculpture garden adjacent to the Mall that was
explicitly cast as a modern-day successor to Downing's romantic landscape
scheme. The NCPC issued a lavish prospectus for Washington's twenty-
first-century development that invoked the grandiose aspirations and rep-
resentational strategies of the Senate Park Commission plan. Pristine
boulevards, waterfront parks, and imposing civic monuments would once
again lead the way to a better—or at least more attractive and economically
vibrant—future.
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Other turn-of-the-twentieth-first-century attempts to reinvent nature in
Washington combined earlier motivations with technological innovation.
One of the most ambitious elements of the NCPC's plan was a proposal for
a gigantic sphere-shaped aquarium to be located along the Anacostia.While
this high-tech “natural” environment remains a pipe dream, the National
Zoo was already thrilling Washingtonians with artificial simulations of nat-
ural environments, which were designed to showcase its exotic collections
while promoting an ecology-based nature ethic. Following the trend
toward more naturalistic display environments that transformed zoological
landscapes in the second half of the twentieth century, the creators of the
National Zoo's “Amazonia” exhibit employed sophisticated technology to
create an artificial “rain forest environment” that rapidly became one of its
top attractions.
The nature of nature in Washington continues to evolve as new tech-
nologies, new cultural concerns, and new environmental factors influence
the ways in which the city's physical environments are constructed and per-
ceived.While the chronological approach employed in this essay provides a
useful narrative framework, it should not be construed as an attempt to sug-
gest that cultural conceptions of nature in Washington have exhibited any
sort of teleological progression toward a more “correct” or desirable state,
or to assert the primacy of one vision over another. Such claims are a com-
mon component of much writing on invention and the environment, as are
implicit or explicit assertions that the most recent approach is better and
more “natural” than its predecessor, so that new policies are necessary to
promote it. By calling attention to the diversity of ways in which humans
have attempted to experience, shape, and understand the nature of nature
in Washington, this essay simply seeks to suggest that what we think of as
