Southwest Washington, Urban Renewal Area, Bounded by Independence Avenue, Washington Avenue, South Capitol Street, Canal Street, P Street, Maine Avenue & Washington Channel, Fourteenth Street, D Street, & Twelfth Street, Washington, District of Columbia, DC
Summary
Significance: Southwest Washington, D.C., was the site of one of the earliest urban renewal efforts in the United States, and the first such renewal effort in the Nation's Capitol. While not the largest urban renewal project ever pursued in the District, it was the city's only full-scale and most comprehensive attempt to redevelop an entire neighborhood. ... Despite the national and international significance of the practices and site, as well as the prominence of the architects and planners involved, the realized New Southwest did not live up to the grand vision its developers had in mind. Consequently, today, many of the hallmark sites of the urban renewal plan - including L'Enfant Plaza, the Waterside Mall, and the waterfront - are marked for redevelopment. These plans, along with other smaller-scale developer initiatives, threaten to significantly alter, or even destroy, some of the urban renewal era buildings and sites. However, at the same time, they also offer hope of remedying some of the failures of urban renewal planning and execution and of improving the neighborhood's shortcomings for today's residents, workers, and visitors.
Unprocessed Field note material exists for this structure: N993
Survey number: HABS DC-856
Building/structure dates: 1945-1973 Initial Construction
The Bauhaus was influenced by 19th and early-20th-century artistic directions such as the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as Art Nouveau and its many international incarnations, including the Jugendstil and Vienna Secession. In the Weimar Republic, a renewed liberal spirit allowed an upsurge of radical experimentation in all the arts. The most important influence on Bauhaus was modernism, a movement whose origins lay as early as the 1880s. After World War Germans of left-wing views were influenced by the cultural experimentation that followed the Russian Revolution, such as constructivism. The Bauhaus style, however, also known as the International Style, was marked by harmony between the function of an object or a building and its design. Bauhaus is characterized by simplified forms, rationality, and functionality, and the idea that mass production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit.
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