1. Washington, D.C.

As the seat of Government, Washington D.C. was planned as a new city with its diagonal axes, squares and grids by Pierre L’Enfant in 1790s, as the national capital of America.

With its grand vistas and symbolic squares all within a 10-mile land quadrilateral around the Potomac River, the city has a particularly distinctive character, quite different from other American cities.

“From the centre of that allegorical Arlington Cemetery one may look out across the Potomac to the grand sweep of the capital beyond. Nothing could appear much less American, for while America is above all a country of verticals, artistic, economic, symbolic, phallic, imposed splendidly upon the passive landscape, Washington, D.C. is all horizontal. Nowhere is much flatter than Washington. The ground is flat. The style is flat. The architecture is deliberately flat. From up there in the Arlington Cemetery the whole city seems to lie in a single plane without depth or perspective, its layered strips of blue, green and white broken only by the obelisk of the Washington Monument and the Capitol dome as the massed ranks of Arlington are interrupted only by the graves of especially important corpses. It looks like a city of slabs, reverently disposed, and only the jets from the National Airport straining themselves with difficulty out of the ambiance, throw a bold diagonal across the scene.” *

From this more modern perspective, Jan Morris identifies the horizontality of the city as being distinctly different from the prevailing modern perception of verticality of other modern American cities.

It is no Chicago nor New York, neither does it have the sprawl of Los Angeles and those prairie cities out west. Still somewhat greener and with more classical sets of buildings as befit national governmental institutions and foreign institutions, it is easy to travel around in by both car and metro.

And yet unbeknown to the city fathers, a new force has evolved resulting from the extension and sprawl outwards to the periphery, overstepping more impoverished mixed neighbourhoods of underclasses, with the creation of the ring, the Washington Beltway that encompasses land of Virginia and Maryland beyond the District of Columbia.

Here, real estate has been developed to house ‘Beltway Bandits’ – American tech-giants, defense and computing groups that benefit from the ‘power of proximity’. Sited close to national decision makers both private and public, such entities have encamped close to the centre of power.

A series of sections of highway have been interlinked since the 1960’s to create the 100 km encircling beltway, now known as the Interstate ‘I-495’ that totally surrounds the original 10-mile square quadrilateral of the District of Columbia before the south-western corner was lost to Virginia.

These clockwise and counter-clockwise Inner and Outer Loops now carry hundreds of thousands of passenger and freight vehicles around the city each day.

Whilst the pattern of movement on the ground may still be recognised by Morris as being horizontal, it has become dizzily ‘orbital’ this century around the centre of the national capital.

*Jan Morris – Travels – The Morning After, Washington D.C., Faber & Faber 1974.