As an Engineer that started in Architecture, the story of Pierre Charles L’Enfant is kind of a sad one to me. His plan and design was a massive undertaking that was way beyond the scale anyone else had done at the time. Yet the time frame, and the lack of likeminded visionaries, just ran too long and hit way too may obstacles.
He had a massive design vision and really needed complete control of the undertaking in order to accomplish it. This lead to a bunch of quarrels with locals and other buisnesses as he needed to pretty much “clean slate” of the entire area to finish it.
He kept his plans secret because some wealthy land owners were trying to buy land where his design was looking to build, in order to block the design from being built, well, without having them paid a major profit to get the land back.
The “secrecy” caused further quarrels even within the government party at thst time and he eventually stepped down. George Washington appointed Andrew Ellicott and Benjamin Banneker to take over the work… and they just half-assed the completion, cut corners, messed up the geometric alignment and just ruined the end result.
It was geometric art at a massive level, and fully able to be completed… only to have the last half horribly “finished”.
The end result to me, is like the half drawn horse, where the beginning is beautifully detailed, and the end half was “completed” by a kindergarten glue sniffer.
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As an Engineer that started in Architecture, the story of Pierre Charles L’Enfant is kind of a sad one to me. His plan and design was a massive undertaking that was way beyond the scale anyone else had done at the time. Yet the time frame, and the lack of likeminded visionaries, just ran too long and hit way too may obstacles.
He had a massive design vision and really needed complete control of the undertaking in order to accomplish it. This lead to a bunch of quarrels with locals and other buisnesses as he needed to pretty much “clean slate” of the entire area to finish it.
He kept his plans secret because some wealthy land owners were trying to buy land where his design was looking to build, in order to block the design from being built, well, without having them paid a major profit to get the land back.
The “secrecy” caused further quarrels even within the government party at thst time and he eventually stepped down. George Washington appointed Andrew Ellicott and Benjamin Banneker to take over the work… and they just half-assed the completion, cut corners, messed up the geometric alignment and just ruined the end result.
It was geometric art at a massive level, and fully able to be completed… only to have the last half horribly “finished”.
The end result to me, is like the half drawn horse, where the beginning is beautifully detailed, and the end half was “completed” by a kindergarten glue sniffer.
I hate that history leaves us with it this way.