Appreciation: Facadism in the Nation’s Capital
A smart compromise saved historic, architecturally interesting streetscapes in Washington while preserving incentives for economic revitalization.
To maintain economic vitality, America’s cities continually evolve through a broil of regeneration with the inevitable tearing down and repurposing of properties for more productive uses. But emotional countercurrents sometimes push against this upheaval, curbing the flow of destruction and rebuilding. Those of us who grew up in cities often harbor a sentimental attachment to the urban landscapes we experienced in youth when we first tasted the freedom cities offer. Nostalgia helps fuel our longing to preserve established architectural features.
Along with New York City, Washington, D.C. was a hotbed of the early movement for historic-building preservation. This movement gained momentum in the 1970s, culminating in enactment of more robust Federal and State historic preservation laws and the Supreme Court’s rejection of the constitutional takings challenge to local property restrictions in Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City.
In Washington, the citizens advocacy group “Don’t Tear It Down, Inc.,” led by David Bonderman, then a partner at D.C. law firm Arnold & Porter, rallied to save several grand, historically notable buildings from destruction, including the Old Post Office, the Franklin School, and the Willard Hotel. Beginning in 1976, one particular focus of the group’s attention was Red Lion Row, a block of iconic 19th-century merchant storefronts lining the south side of I Street, N.W., between 20th and 21st Streets in Foggy Bottom.
The Red Lion Row buildings (most not officially recognized as landmarks) were sadly dilapidated, and the block’s owner, the developer Foley & Company, planned to raze the old structures and redevelop the site. Foley had already begun bulldozing the rear sections of several buildings when Don’t Tear It Down secured court orders temporarily blocking demolition and convinced the D.C. government to revoke the demolition permit pending efforts to negotiate an alternative to save what remained of the historic buildings.
During the halt in demolition, in 1978, the District passed a new law making it harder for landowners to tear down historically significant structures and the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Penn Central, saving New York City’s Grand Central Terminal from major redevelopment. These changes in the legal landscape significantly altered the balance of leverage in negotiations over the fate of Red Lion Row.
At this point, Foley had had enough and put the property up for sale. The Row sat on the market for months until eventually the George Washington University stepped in and purchased it. In 1980, GWU came forward with an innovative new development plan, proposing to retain the facades of all 13 buildings in the Row and some of the remaining interior features while constructing a major new office building behind the historic shopfronts. After an extensive review process with input and push back from Don’t Tear It Down, the plan was revised and finally approved by the District.
Completed in 1983, the structure that resulted from this compromise, 2000 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., is itself quite historically significant because it was the first example of an adaptive reuse of properties in D.C. in which an entire city block of once distinct historic building facades was preserved together as a set and integrated into a larger overall structure where almost everything behind the preserved facades was new construction.
Critics have objected to 2000 Pennsylvania’s massive, modern office building, saying it looks like a giant cruise ship looming behind the quaint fronts of Red Lion Row. For my part, though, I’ve always admired the structure, and, in particular, I think the stark metallic background works nicely to frame and accentuate the colorful textures of the historic facades.
Love it or hate it, 2000 Pennsylvania ushered in a virtuous (in my opinion) wave of similar adaptive-reuse development projects in the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s that saved many varied, interesting old building facades along the streets of downtown Washington. Here are some examples:
Here’s what the same block of 11th Street looked like shortly before the redevelopment:
The reconstructed block that now houses the Lansburgh apartment building, 825 8th Street, N.W., completed 1991, preserves and incorporates the stately period facade of D.C.’s once-busy Lansburgh Department Store, among other historic facades:
I remember the impressive sight of the Lansburgh’s thin old masonry walls, so high and fragile, held up against gravity by iron girders when this development was under construction.
And the Embassy of Spain, completed in 1990, is an unabashed exemplar of facadism:
While Washington and its developers have led the way in embracing this architectural movement in the United States, there are notable examples in New York and other cities, too. For a while before law school in the early 80s, I worked for Avon Books, a division of the Hearst Corporation, in the famous “Sand Castle,” the vintage 1928 sandstone-clad Hearst Magazine Building on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. In the 2000s, the building underwent a complete redevelopment, and the historic castle now forms the base of a booming glass tower designed by Norman Foster.
The sandstone facade is all that remains of the old Hearst building, its walls enclosing a gaping entranceway and atrium for the new structure:
Some preservationists decry projects like those above, declaring that stripping away all but the outer cladding of historic buildings and incorporating only the preserved facades into a new structure isn’t true historic preservation. They scorn these designs as mere “facadism” — or, more contemptuously, “facadectomies” or “facadomies.” E.g., Starr Herr-Cardillo, “Saving a Facade Is Not Historic Preservation,” Hidden City Philadelphia, Aug. 23, 2018. For a useful background discussion, see Kerensa Sanford Wood, Master’s Thesis, Architecture of Compromise: A History and Analysis of Facadism in Washington, D.C. (Columbia Univ., Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, May 2012).
But an adamant rejection of facadism forgets that each of the distinct materials and features of a historic building — most especially the outward-facing skin, which, after all, was designed for the common enjoyment and appreciation of all passersby — can have its own architectural value worth preserving. It’s too dismissive of the public benefits — aesthetic, sentimental, cultural, historical, intellectual — of retaining, framing, and honoring the architectural fine points of delightful period exteriors.
And, of course, anti-facadism downplays the economic reality that the cost of rehabilitating the interiors of decrepit, outdated structures is frequently incompatible with achieving a profitable development project and with the efficient repurposing of a property. If we deny facadism any credit for historic preservation, then the last remaining traces of many historic structures will be swept away in the tidal push for economic development, while many other potentially valuable properties will molder in decrepitude.
Recognizing this reality, and in an effort to balance the competing goals of architectural preservation and economic revitalization, Congress gave facadism a boost with Federal tax incentives. The Federal Historic Preservation Tax Incentives program, first authorized by Congress in 1976, encourages private sector investment in the rehabilitation of certified historic income-producing structures (i.e., not to include owner-occupied residences) by offering an income tax credit equal to 20% of the qualified cost of rehabilitating the building’s historic materials and features.
The program is administered by the National Park Service with assistance from the IRS and State historic preservation officers, and the availability of tax credits is subject to meeting the “Standards for Rehabilitation” issued by the Secretary of the Interior. Under the Secretary’s Standards, “Rehabilitation” means “the process of returning a property to a state of utility, through repair or alteration, which makes possible an efficient contemporary use while preserving those portions and features of the property which are significant to its historic, architectural, and cultural values.”
Like most Federal agencies, the Park Service enjoys a good deal of administrative latitude in deciding whether a particular rehabilitation proposal satisfies the Secretary’s Standards. For example, the Standards specify that “New additions, exterior alterations, or related new construction shall not destroy historic materials that characterize the property,” that the new construction “shall be differentiated from the old and shall be compatible with the massing, size, scale, and architectural features to protect the historic integrity of the property and its environment,” and that new additions “shall be undertaken in such a manner that if removed in the future, the essential form and integrity of the historic property and its environment would be unimpaired.” These requirements involve subjective judgments about multiple variables and can be applied in particular cases more strictly or liberally depending on the policy preferences of agency leadership at the time.
A shift in the Park Service’s approach may explain, in part, the distinct drop off in facadism in new office construction in D.C. in recent years. There are fewer major redevelopment projects featuring facadism in downtown Washington today than at the height of the trend before the mid-2000s, and that’s a shame in my view. Maybe there are just fewer interesting old building facades left to preserve in Washington, but I seriously doubt that. Perhaps the Park Service has bowed to the anti-facadism sentiments of critics and has tightened the screws on facadist proposals. I don’t know that that’s the case — I don’t have research showing that the Park Service began rejecting facade-only preservation projects similar to those that received tax credits in earlier years. It’s also possible the District’s planning and historic preservation bodies became increasingly influenced by anti-facadism preservationists.
But there’s another, perhaps more important, factor, unrelated to principles of architectural preservation, that may help explain the decline of facadism in Washington: environmental considerations. Specifically, within the last two decades, there’s arisen a growing clamor to maximize the energy efficiency of new and renovated buildings, both because of concerns about energy costs and because of the asserted connection between fossil fuel use and global climate trends. There’s an unavoidable tension between imposing the most demanding requirements for energy efficiency in new construction and the preservation of older structures that are less energy efficient.
One set of industry standards for gauging the energy efficiency of a building is promulgated by ASHRAE, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers. ASHRAE Standard 90.1 sets forth minimum energy “performance” benchmarks for commercial and high-rise residential buildings — specifically, for the building’s interior lighting, heating, cooling, ventilation, and hot water systems, and for its “envelope,” which encompasses the building’s entire exterior, including roof, walls, insulation, doors, windows, and foundation.
Another popular measure of the greenness of buildings is the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or “LEED,” rating system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council. Projects evaluated under LEED are scored in various environmental categories — one of which is “Energy and Atmosphere” — and, depending on how they score, can qualify for graduated levels of certification, from the base level, Certified, up through Silver and Gold, to the premier level, Platinum. LEED ratings have come to be valued in the marketplace, and developers of commercial office buildings now regularly tout LEED certification as a badge of prestige when marketing properties to potential corporate tenants. The higher the LEED status, the greater the building’s perceived environmental cachet, which presumably translates into a price premium for the developer.
Here, too, as it did with historic preservation, Congress has weighed in with tax benefits to encourage the construction of energy-efficient buildings. Beginning with enactment of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Congress has granted a tax deduction of up to $1.80 times the square footage of a commercial office building for the cost of installing new lighting, HVAC, or water systems or a “building envelope” that’s certified to exceed a specified benchmark of energy performance for the building, including by reference to ASHRAE Standard 90.1. Whether merely coincidental or causative, this Federal income tax incentive kicked in right around the time facadism began its decline in Washington. And since that time, many State and local governments have piled on with their own incentives, including property tax breaks, for the development of green buildings, often keyed to LEED certifications.
The potential for energy loss or “leakage” from any portion of a building’s envelope — its roof, exterior walls, foundation — can affect the building’s overall energy performance under the ASHRAE standard and its LEED rating. Redevelopment projects that incorporate recycled historic facades are handicapped (or at least are perceived to have a disadvantage) in meeting today’s most rigorous standards of energy performance, since the preserved facades are usually made of antique brick or stone masonry or iron and often come with vintage roofing, window structures, doors, foundations, and insulating materials, all of which can be more porous than newer materials and have the potential to allow greater energy leakage.
Given the economic and socio-political incentives to offer properties with the highest environmental performance status, it’s no surprise that D.C. today is experiencing a rapid proliferation of new and renovated buildings that come sealed from top to bottom in one continuous hermetic curtain wall of tinted glass, like this:
Or this redeveloped building:
Or this, Washington’s first LEED Platinum office building:
The Nation’s Capital has become a showplace for this new architectural impulsion, and so it’s also not a surprise that in August 2017 the Green Building Council named Washington, D.C. the world’s first LEED Platinum City.
The all-glass monoshell is clearly the fashion statement of the day for new commercial properties in Washington. It seems to represent the signature image of the green building, and for that reason alone it may be the design de rigueur for those commercial tenants who want their office buildings to project to the world and to their employees the organization’s pro-environment credentials. Indeed, I suspect that the tinted glass-turtle look is now so firmly associated with greenness in the marketplace that a competing facadist building will still face a marginal marketing disadvantage in the eyes of some potential tenants even when engineered to be an energy-efficient high performer.
Don’t get me wrong: Energy conservation is certainly important, and improving the energy efficiency of the built environment is a sensible and worthwhile objective that should be rewarded in the marketplace. After all, the main reason 21st-century homes and offices are so much more spacious, open, and airy than the structures built in previous centuries is precisely because today’s HVAC systems and building materials are far more energy efficient. But, still, I have to say that streets lined with monotonous walls of greenish glass just don’t pluck my heartstrings the way the good old-fashioned facades can do.
I suppose Ayn Rand, an uncompromising champion of human genius and creativity and author of The Fountainhead, would have scoffed at any sentimental inclination to keep patches of yesteryear’s architectural forms pasted on the fronts of new office buildings. I mostly share her fervor for bold originalism in architecture. But when the products of new construction all start to look the same, and the designs seem chosen in large part to project conformity with the latest tenets of social correctness, something of the human spirit is expelled from our cities, and I’m pretty sure she, too, would have rebelled at that.
So for me at least it’s —
Vive le façadisme!
