The Genius Design of Washington D.C.

Understandting

I wonder sometimes what if Philly stayed as our capital? Or what if after everything was built & the capital came back to Philly, what both layouts would be?

Manila

CENTRAL VISTA PROJECT OF NEW DELHI is going to replicate CENTRAL MALL OF WASHINGTON DC....

Waiting to finish project......

Horripilus lanscape!!

btw you mispronounced L' enfant. With French words; if the last letter is a constant; it's silent. Sounds like L' enfah

Доналд Тръмп той ме изгони от белият дом сега се оправяйте как намирате 2023😊

The Washington monument is not 550 feet. It's 555' and 5 1/8 " tall and 55' wide at the base

Even Egypt uses Washington's design to build its NAC.

It's frikin nightmare dude. NYC is way better planned out. Nice presentation.

Why it isn’t placed more centred in the middle of America ?

Please add here Astana, it was also clearly inspired by DC. Even being named after the first president for a little while.

so, are you tellin' me that every city/capital city on the world that were planned and designed in grid and wide avenues are copying WASHINGTON DC? I mean .. calm down my buddy.

How were the avenues designed with cars in mind "which was seen as a necessity in the 20th century" if the street grid was designed and built in the early to mid 19th century?

As a DC resident I can tell you it works fairly well in the older, flatter downtown areas. Once you get farther afield and into actual geography of hills and creeks the system breaks down making it very difficult to get east to west. Further complicating the system was the disastrous attempt to put interstate highways through the city, which were only partially completed before residents revolted leaving partial highways that cut off sections of town and do not simplify auto transportation as intended.

Why is the Monument off center from the White House axis? Error or design?

Why does this voiceover have the exact same pitch and rhythm for every sentence? It's driving me bonkers.

I just toured the east ciast and D.C. was by far the most beautiful city!

,,Laughs in European"

I wish all american cities could be as well-designed as our capital

Based in my experience to the states, DC was the best city

And it couldn't stop protesters from breaking in😂

Imagine how much nicer the city would be if they started to limit cars and promote the metro system more.

All the pollution would start to die down leaving a nice walkable city with fresh air and nature sounds, instead of heavy air and car sounds

capitol is one of the sexiest buildings I have ever seen❤✨🔥

Ngl despite being very walkable the traffic is stills beyond terrible

Our central square is Kim Il-sung Square, which is where military parades are held for national holidays. It is the "kilometer zero" of the DPRK from where all national road distances are measured. It is similar in form and design to the Tiananmen Square in Beijing and is used for the same purposes. It is architecturally more refined with its dramatic riverside setting. By observing, the Juche Tower appears to be located directly towards the west end of the square, although it is actually across the Taedong. The biggest building of the square is the Great People's Study House which houses 30 million books and was built as the "center for the project of intellectualizing the whole of society and a sanctuary of learning for the entire people."

Our Juche Tower rivals the Washington Monument. Our Juche Tower measures 558 feet/170 m while the Washington Monument measures 555 feet/169 m. It opened in 1982 to commemorate my grandpa's seventieth birthday. It contains 25,550 blocks, one block for each day of my grandpa's life up until that point. And it serves as the backdrop for our holiday firework shows

Not just the street grid design, but the design of the DC Metro system, especially downtown, is incredible! The flashing lights on the platform whenever a train arrives, the hexagonal tiles, the waffle-style concrete vault Brutalism, it was built as a showcase system, and it shows. They were designed by Harry Weese, and he worked with Massachusetts-based lighting designer Bill Lam on the indirect lighting used throughout the system. He visited London, Paris, Rome, Stockholm, and many other smaller cities, hoping to take the best elements of each and combine them into the perfect system for DC.

Weese created a proposal with dozens of views for station interiors with a simple semiellipse, with a flat bottom and curved top. For cut-and-cover stations, the vault was proposed to have straight, vertical walls supporting a curved ceiling. But the CFA wanted it to be beautiful, and no exposed rock walls like Stockholm, so he changed his thought. He felt the necessities of each station would produce the variety, that "You don't try to make them different for different's sake. We think it's very appropriate for Washington. After all". To Weese, the sweeping, swooping, floating lines of Metro's plazas, stations and mezzanines are the system's best feature. Once they were chosen, he said, the long, long escalators and the indirect, somewhat dim lighting in stations fell into step as a result.

The design of Albany's Empire State Plaza is similar in design to the National Mall as well, though officially it was modeled after Brasília, Versailles, and India's Chandigarh. Empire State Plaza was the idea of Governor Nelson Rockefeller in the 1960s, who was inspired to create the complex after Queen Juliana of the Netherlands visited Albany for a celebration of the area's Dutch history. The plaza's massive scale was designed to look menacing on purpose so it could be the dominating feature seen from the Hudson River. It was designed by Wallace Harrison, who also worked on Rockefeller Center, the United Nations Headquarters and the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center.

The NY State Capitol itself is quite cool. It was built between 1867 and 1899. Three teams of architects worked on the design of the Capitol during the 32 years of its construction which were Thomas Fuller (from 1867 to 1875), Leopold Eidlitz and Henry Hobson Richardson (1875 to 1883), and Isaac G. Perry (1883 to 1899). Thomas Fuller was the same guy who designed the buildings of Parliament Hill in Ottawa! As the result of the different architects, the state capitol is in different styles throughout including Romanesque and French Renaissance. Inside are 25 murals created by William de Leftwich Dodge that depict everything from Samuel de Champlain to New York troops serving in World War I.

This video needed more research / information / justification. A lot of repetition of claims that aren't explained

The genius is the discount they got on the labor in building the city

You forgot Wisconsin Avenue 😠

Brasilia is better 😌

Spends too much time talking about places that aren't DC

DC was one of the worst cities I been to and I honestly can't really explain why. Sure, it was pretty and the way the roads and everything are laid out are acceptable. The traffic is awful though. Not the worst in the country, but I was getting stuck in huge traffic jams quite often with people honking all around me. And the people there are extremely rude and entitled. Yall thought NYC was rude? DC takes it to a whole nother level. I had a very unpleasant time there, but maybe I'll go back and give the city another chance. Just not anytime soon..

Can you do the germania capital

Washington D.C. is formed as it is today by the city of Karlsruhe in Germany, which served as a model when Thomas Jefferson visited and was so inspired that he wanted the same cityscape in the USA....

It's called the Elipse. No one from DC calls it "President's Park"

it is inaccurate and wrong to say Brasilia was inspired in Washington. Brasilia was mentioned in Brasil's first constitution and was meant to unite the country alongside many other reasons and historic facts (to plan a city and to make it a national project mirror is not an USA's exclusivity, Europe stands out in this discussion)... Oscar Niemeyer was a pioneer arquitect from a whole different context and is responsible for unique contributions to the history of architecture, given that it is really hard to get to this conclusion... Washington is beautiful by the way.

One of the most boring capitals in the world..

Oh, sweet Persian architecture that the French brought to the world

DC is one of the worst designed cities in America. Its 4 quadrants make it difficult to know where you are with many having similar addresses, the only difference being a NE, SE, NW, SW designation.

I’ve also heard that it was intentionally designed with difficulty so that if we were ever invaded enemies would get bogged down.

The only good thing it has is public transit. Their metro is very easy to use.

Mentioned multiple times that DC was/is built to serve as a seat of government and a place for visitors but you completely disregard its purpose as a city where actual Americans live. Where more Americans live than whole states like Wyoming and Alaska.

Just one correction, you mentioned the Monumental Axis in Brasília, but highlighted the Great Axis in the video. The Monumental runs East-West and goes from the old railway station to the Three Powers Square, being surrounded by most of the important government buildings, while the Great Axis runs North-South, in a bend resembling the wings of an airplane, and is the main road connecting the two neighbourhoods that make up the downtown, South Wing and North Wing. That said, Brasilia is indeed very dependant on highways, and I only started noticing how much better is a walkable city when I started traveling to other cities, especially Buenos Aires.

This video was interesting right up until the end when you talk about how it was "designed with cars in mind." I'm not an expert by any means, but I can't imagine that L'Enfant has a time machine of visionary seer capabilities to know the rise of the automobile two centuries after he actually designed the city. That's some pretty rich claims about the city's designs that I'm not buying.

No one can re create my city ❤️