July 7, 2008
Dear Coalition Friends:
Just out from Johns Hopkins University Press is THE NATIONAL MALL: Rethinking Washington's Monumental Core, a collection of essays about the Mall's past, present and future. In Part I Architectural historians Cynthia Field, Michael J. Lewis and Richard Guy Wilson provide fresh understanding of the planners’ intentions. Witold Rybczynski, winner of the prestigious Vincent Scully Prize for 2007, explains how the Mall reflects the best of American landscape architecture. In Part II, anthropologists Edith L.B. Turner and Richard Kurin and a humanist scholar, Frederick Turner, give their views of the use of the Mall. In Part II, leaders of community organizations, Coalition Chair Judy Scott Feldman being one, and a distinguished sociologist address the future.
The book is available at the bookstore at the National Building Museum and on Amazon.com--and we hope at your local bookstore. For more information about the book, go HERE or contact Cynthia R. Field, Ph.D., at fieldcy@yahoo.com.
My essay in the book, "Turning Point: The Problematics of Building on the Mall Today," uses three recent case studies to examine how the plan and design process works (or doesn't) from Congressional authorization to site selection and design review. This essay includes many of the observations that led our Coalition to call for an independent commission to craft a long-range vision and planning framework for the Mall as a whole. In summing up I write, "Mall planning is broken, after more than a century of growth, change, increasing public use, and accumulation of jurisdictions, authorities, and oversight committees. Modern public use, commemoration, and security overwhelm and continue to chip away at the integrity of the Mall’s majestic public open space. The multiple managing and review agencies protect their Mall fiefs while the public’s needs are neglected" and conclude that "Public involvement, a critical component missing in all three case studies and in the past century of Mall development, will be essential to achieving success."
Be sure to visit our website to keep up with some of the latest media coverage of the Mall and information about current issues--www.savethemall.org.
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