Courtyard Project Creates Downtown Centerpiece
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Gallery Pl-Chinatown
WHEN YOU WALK into the old Patent Office Building's F Street NW entrance just after sundown, you're immediately drawn to two very different things: Robert Mills' ancient double curving staircase and a passageway leading to a hazy bluish light.
The staircase will bring you up to the second- and third-level treasures of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery; the azure glow beyond is the Smithsonian Institution's new signature space, the Kogod Courtyard. The Norman Foster-designed enclosure in the center of the building is the one of the last major redevelopment pieces to fit into the complex downtown jigsaw puzzle near the Verizon Center. And it jibes with the building, too — the $63 million renovation was carefully coordinated not to alter the facade of the old Greek Revival building, which dates back to the 1830s.
So far, reaction to the new space, which was highly controversial during the planning process, has been quite favorable. Writes The Post's Philip Kennicott:
Good buildings shift arguments, and it's time the argument about preservation moved on from a blinkered, fundamentalist devotion to every scrap of old brick. Washington will become an aesthetic dead zone if it can't begin to do more of what the Foster canopy does very well: integrate the new and daring with the old and tested. But rather than see this courtyard and the glassy wave above it as the limit of how the new and the old can be compatible, it should be taken as a first step. And others should go further.For being a fairly simple glass canopy, the structure is also highly complex. As The New York Times' Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote on Monday:
When you stare directly up at the grid of beams, it seems almost symmetrical; but as you move around the courtyard, it begins to change form, undulating like a sheet in a gentle breeze. On sunny days the grid will cast a fishnet pattern of shadows over the old facades; at night its forms become more muscular and mysterious.
Ten years ago, the multi-purpose arena across 7th Street NW first known as the MCI Center helped spark a neighborhood renaissance for Gallery Place, Chinatown and Penn Quarter. And as the Verizon Center is in the middle of celebrating a decade in business, with the Kogod Courtyard, the Smithsonian has opened what is sure to be a major draw for tourists and locals alike.
The building's hours will likely be a big help to that end. While the Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture's 7 p.m. closing isn't exactly night-owl territory, it is later than most local museums, which shut their doors by 5 p.m. That extra couple of hours could lure downtown office workers looking to fill that awkward period between work and their nighttime plans.
The reuse of the space without altering the building is a huge feat. A similar Foster-designed courtyard at the British Museum brought change to that building's face. However, federal historic protections limited what could be done to the Reynolds Center.
Across F Street, the Tariff Office Building, a Mills-designed Greek Revival structure now home to Hotel Monaco and its Poste restaurant, is similarly protected. Those restrictions gave developers there a reason to be creative, too — a glass-enclosed section of Poste was designed to be physically separate from the original structure so as to not alter its facade. It's the same spirit of the new coexisting peacefully with the old that brings an added eye-pleasing dimension to the Hotel Monaco and, now, the Reynolds Center.
As revitalization ushers in new residents, consumers and construction to the Gallery Place area, it's heartening to see a structure as grand and historic as the Patent Office Building find not only relevance, but new life. And its stately new courtyard will no doubt be seen as the finest centerpiece a neighborhood could ask for.
» "Seeing the Light at Last" [WaPo]
» "A Delicate Glass Roof With Links to the Past" [NYT]
First photo by David S. Holloway/Smithsonian Institution; second and third photos by Ken Rahaim/Smithsonian Institution
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