L'Enfant Plaza - Architectural Assessment

Architectural Assessment

L'Enfant Plaza was considered a masterpiece when it opened in 1968. Washington Post architectural critic Wolf von Eckardt called it "a triumph of good architecture over bad planning." He believed it would be D.C.'s version of Rockefeller Center or the Place Ville-Marie, and predicted people would throng the plaza—which he felt would be the "city's major urban attraction." Von Eckardt piled praise on the plaza itself, calling it "exceptionally attractive" and "modern America's most beautiful 'outdoor salon'". He also lauded the "marvelous" cruciform-and-globe light fixtures and the huge "dramatic" fountain. Architects Chloethiel Woodard Smith and Louis Justement felt the esplanade and plaza were an "essential...appropriate entrance to the Southwest." Five years later, in 1973, von Eckardt continued to sing the plaza's praises despite its shortcomings. Although he recognized that the plaza was largely devoid of foot traffic most of the time, he considered it a "superb work of urban design" on par with the great plazas and squares built in Paris under Napoleon III or Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City.

Such high praise did not last. Even von Eckardt felt the Forrestal building was an "esthetic disaster" (sic) and "silly"—"like an elephant tottering on the legs of a giraffe." He heartily disliked the design of the plaza itself ("all the charm of an empty freeway") Banneker Park, with its minimalist fountain, came in for similar criticism. He declared that the city's decision to cancel the skywalk to Maine Avenue SW ruined the southern end of the Promenade: "It ends with a whimper." Two years after L'Enfant Plaza opened, Washington Post architecture critic Eugene L. Meyer called it a "ghost town", and said it was "not living up to its advance billing." One of the Zeckendorff architects who worked on the design, Araldo Cossutta, declared it a "product of outmoded city planning". The complex's reputation did not improve over the next 30 years. In 2003, Washington Post architectural critic Benjamin Forgey was just as critical:

The Pei solution was elegant on paper but, as we know, it did not work very well in practice. The plaza today is lusterless and very nearly lifeless, and the 10th Street connector, renamed the L'Enfant Promenade, seems just another pretentious, failed dream. ... Much of the fault clearly rests with the plan itself. Life is sucked out of the plaza by an extensive, wrongheaded underground retail mall. The wide, ceremonial roadway is simply too much for too little, like a symphonic fanfare introducing a high school band recital. And there's little reward for taking the road—it leads only to a dreary auto turnaround overlooking the (equally dreary) redeveloped Southwest waterfront.

He also noted that Pei himself fiercely fought construction of the Forrestal Building, knowing that it would severely compromise the Promenade's view of the National Mall. Art critic Hank Burchard called L'Enfant Plaza a "pitiful and pitiless 'plaza' that dishonors the name of L'Enfant" in 1992. The complex's popularity with citizens hadn't improved, either. Another Washington Post reporter noted in 2005 that L'Enfant Plaza "shuts down" at night and on weekends, creating an effect described as a "Valley of the Tombs". In 2010, the Washington City Paper said L'Enfant Plaza "could easily contend for the honor of being modern urban design's grandest mistake." It called the complex an "unmitigated urban planning disaster", and strongly criticized the Forrestal Building for isolating the promenade from the rest of the city.