Creating a memorable sense of place where there was none is one of the most important tasks that architecture can perform and, to our good fortune, it's one of the jobs that many Washington architects have learned to do very well. The firm of Hartman-Cox continues to be a primary teacher of this critical lesson.
Witness: the new Gewirz Student Center at the Georgetown University Law Center downtown, a quietly distinguished building that, literally and figuratively, helps to transform the things around it.
A decade ago even the most avid booster of the law school would not have claimed there was a campus on the lot bounded by New Jersey Avenue and Second, F and G streets NW. Rather, there was an all-purpose building that sat like a solitary -- and quite ugly -- iceberg on a raised platform in the middle of the block. Back then, recalls Therese Stratton, director of administration, the commonest complaint among students was the school's distance from the university's main campus on the Georgetown heights. "Now," she says, "we don't hear that anymore."
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The transformation began in the late '80s when the law center, running out of room in its iceberg, decided to build a library immediately to the north, across Second Street, and to use freed-up spaces in the existing structure for faculty offices and such. The school was fortunate, this time, in its choice of architects -- the Hartman-Cox-designed library, completed in 1989, provided a strong starting point.
A notable piece of work in a subdued sort of Greco-deco mode, the library created a strong, attractive edge along Massachusetts Avenue, a northern "wall" for the campus. The south-facing main facade, with its striking, full-height cylindrical entryway, provided the beginnings of a north-south axis around which to organize the school's various activities. A block of G Street was closed, cars making way for an alluring campus green, and space underneath the iceberg's platform was ingeniously converted to student uses -- a cafeteria, a pub, study spaces, a couple of sunken courtyards.
Yet it took another building -- the Gewirz Center, named for prime donors Bernard and Sarah Gewirz -- to close the axis on the south, making a genuine if somewhat curious ensemble of three buildings all in a row. The curiousness is due to the stylistic incongruity between the new buildings and the old one. It's as if two recent arrivals in fancy dress were laying siege to a plain-Jane castle -- a k a the iceberg -- in the middle. But more on this in a moment.
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To call the latest addition a student center is a bit misleading. Primarily it's a residence hall for part of the law center's freshman class, accommodating about 280 of 500 full-time first-year students. Except for a ballroom with fine views from the top floor, communal uses are confined to the basement and ground floor -- a fitness center, an aerobics room, medical facilities, moot courtrooms, offices for eight student-run law journals.
Share this articleShareBehind most good architecture stands a good client, runs the adage, certainly true here. Anxious to maintain or improve the law center's high ranking on the national law school list, the university was determined to build a dormitory -- "One hallmark of the finest institutions is that they are residential," says law center dean Judith Areen. In keeping with these ambitions, the client didn't want the institutional look typical of college dorms in the postwar era.
Hartman-Cox was able to do the rest. "They wanted the look of a first-class apartment building," says partner Mario Boiardi (in charge of design with partner Warren Cox), and that's what they got. The building is long, narrow and high -- 60 feet by 240 feet by 12 stories -- and it has the comfortable, almost patented Hartman-Cox feel of having been there quite a long time.
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The long elevations, facing Second Street on the west and a vacant lot on the other side, are masterfully done in matters both large and small. They march along in a rhythm of projections and recessions -- at once orderly and subtly syncopated. The highest floor is set back in accordance with the city's zoning code -- an opportunity, Boiardi points out, to give the structure a distinguished top, in this case a simple rectangular block framed by colonnaded arcades. The bottom floor is emphasized by stonelike, rusticated precast concrete panels.
In between, the surfaces are enlivened by a nice push-pull of paired windows, metal railings, pilasters, half columns and ornamental devices such as scrolled or fluted friezes, braided balcony rails and even playful little triglyphs, the latter a sign of the design's distant origins in the classical Doric order. It's very simple stuff -- all the ornament was cast in high-quality concrete -- and it's very pleasing too, helping systematically to break down the large building to touchable human scale.
These are the facades one most often sees from outside the campus, its long-distance identifying marks. From almost anywhere on the grounds it's the narrow north facade that counts: a strong piece, with an arched entryway and a tall cylindrical form framed by symmetrical wings. The cylinder is centered, of course, on that north-south axis, echoing like an exclamation point the library's powerful entryway.
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If one hangs around for a bit one begins to notice other devices the architects used to pull things together. Arcades, for instance, are a pleasant, repeated motif -- they help to define the G Street "quad," they give an edge to the formerly edgeless platform of the central building, they mark the top of the residence hall. Both physically and symbolically, they demarcate places to gather, public places. Altogether, then, this is architecture admirably deployed in the service of good urban design: It links disparate parts, frames a vista, gives cohesion to a sequence of spaces.
Ironically, back in the late '60s when the university hired Edward Durrell Stone to design its new downtown building, it must have thought it was hiring the best talent available. And in a way it was. Stone was one of the most highly publicized architects of his day and, further irony, he was one of the first to begin breaking the mold of the modern, international style by looking again to history for design cures. The flared steel columns for the Stone-designed Kennedy Center, for example, represent an attempt to update the ancient classical tradition, to give it renewed life in the 20th century.
But for Georgetown Stone did far from his best work: There's but the faintest residue of the classical temple idea in this ungainly building. And, in any case, it was a terrible period for campus architecture, as one can trace on practically any college campus in the land. Stone's idea for the law center was antagonistic to the very idea of a campus -- his building was a megastructure (and a very uninteresting one at that) into which everything was to be squeezed. The city was to be left rudely behind or, rather, below that platform upon which the iceberg-castle-temple stood.
And still stands. The final irony, of course, is that though it's as unappealing as ever, the boxy megastructure has been significantly improved by the added buildings: They don't so much put it to shame as incorporate it into a new, more humanely conceived order. The law center is an ensemble of buildings now -- an odd trio, but a trio.
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