To Build a Metaphor: L’Enfant’s Design for the City of Washington

Abstract

Recent scholarship provides evidence for reconsidering the original urban plan for Washington, DC, one of the world’s few planned cities. Commissioned by President George Washington in 1791, Pierre L’Enfant did not, as some scholarship claims, simply follow baroque urban design concepts with associated geometric patterns for his design. Rather, the character of the land guided the location of public squares, each for a state with a “reciprocity of sight” along communicating avenues. L’Enfant conceived of these individual but visually linked state districts as a metaphor that demonstrated a new nation’s ideals of independence and unity in built form.