ArchiCritic: Crystal City Shops
12 08 2009Everyone has an opinion on architecture, what’s yours?
By Spencer Lepler
On Friday, August 8, I went to a reception in Crystal City Water Park for a series of bamboo sculptures by an architect and artist who had previously exhibited at Artomatic, Sergio Martinez. The sculptures are interesting explorations of delineations of space and are worth the trip to Crystal City to see. So are the fountains at the Water Park; it is a calming oasis of human scale landscape architecture nestled within a modernist super block city. It lies just across Crystal Drive from the Shops at Crystal City.
After the reception I decided to venture within the shops in search of some food, and I was at once reminded of the first time I had come to Crystal City when I moved to Alexandria in 2005 and why I had never returned. When you first emerge from the Metro station, the name “Crystal City” evokes the idea of an open and airy place which should be light filled and enjoyable; in short, you are expecting The Fashion Center at Pentagon City. Instead you encounter a maze of low ceilinged dark “streets” with little sunlight and a deserted ghost town feel.
In addition, the mall keeps odd hours, it is only open Monday through Saturday and closes shortly after the workday ends; the shops inside cater not to casual shoppers but office workers looking for a quick bite or hurrying to accomplish an errand. It is as if this underground city is intended to be foreboding towards tourists and instead act as a respite for the government workers above.
The mall, which opened in 1976 and was touted as the a mall of the future, was set up as an urban streets-cape, complete with fake cobblestone streets and building facades. The only remnants of this “Victorian main street” concept are the cobblestone pavers and the storefronts that are vacant or have marginal retail establishments. There has been no strategic enforcement of this original Victorian concept, so the place ends up looking like a motley of different design styles. Furthermore, this design scheme only occurs in the main shopping nodes, each of which consists of a relatively small area in the grand scheme of Crystal City linked to each other through a series of tunnels much like a hamster terrarium…
I should add that these nodes have none of the major stores you would find in a Simon on Westfields mall; instead there is the Boeing company store, the BRAC Transition Center and the metro operated Commuter Store. Outside of the main shopping nodes the tunnels are stark concrete block, which has sometimes been carefully designed into patterns, but never seems warm and inviting. The overly long and barren passages take circuitous routes between four underground plazas. The official literature touts these passages as a wonderful way to connect shopping districts while enabling the user to avoid the inclement weather outside. This strikes a chord with me, while the DC and Northern Virginia areas may have some hot and muggy summer days (like the heat wave we are currently in) we are spared the months of oppressive heat and humidity of southern cities like New Orleans and Atlanta and the biting winters of northern cities like Chicago and Buffalo. Are subterranean tunnels, which incidentally double the time it takes to travel between buildings, really necessary?
Yet, my critique of Crystal City would be remiss if i did not acknowledge the recent steps taken to make this shopping center (or at least the restaurants) more accessible and connected to the urban street scape. First of all, the roads have been reworked to serve as both pedestrian corridors and local streets, instead of their previous incarnation as high speed transit corridors. Second, the building addresses have been reintegrated into the neighborhood number scheme: e.g. Crystal Plaza 3 and Crystal Mall 1 have been renamed more urban integrated names 2100 Crystal Drive and 1800 South Bell Street. Lastly, along Crystal Drive between 20th and 23rd Streets their has been significant attention paid to encouraging restaurants that engage the street with outdoor cafe seating and broad expanses of windows. At night, you could be forgiven for thinking that this was a lively part of town with a thriving restaurant and nightclub scene.
Yet, even when these exterior changes have been taken into account the Shops at Crystal City seems to fall short. Wandering the zigzagging passageways of crystal city you are filled with a notion that this place is not for you. You are trespassing in the underground service corridors of government. A place for the servants of the gods to shop and dine on their lunch breaks and scurry through on their way back to the metro after work. The few lively spots at night are the peripheral restaurants who deem to stay open so tourists in the attached hotels can find someplace to buy overpriced food. This post modern pastiche is a clear reaction to the stark modern urban renewal which was rampant in DC when this mall was built, as evidenced in the other famous super block development L’Enfant Plaza. Yet, this tacky subterranean 1970s architecture is also devoid of place. This fallen main street is from a city that never was, but in a way is somewhat yearning to be. When this was built the concept of urban festival malls and new urban developments were just springing into being. The Shops at Crystal City seems to want to claim a sense of hometown familiarity and nostalgia for the federal workers by establishing a human scale and providing a new version of the traditional shopping district; stores below and offices and residences in the urban super blocks above all encapsulated in a climate and security controlled artificial box. In the end, Crystal City Shops fails to achieve its goal. The beauty of a real main street lies in the interplay of culture, traffic, pedestrians and weather, and Crystal City Shops only has pedestrians.
[Photo: MV Jantzen]
Spencer Lepler is an architectural designer nearing the end of the architecture licensing process. He has lived in the DC metro area since 2005. He posts on a semi-regular basis to his blog – selophane.com. In addition to writing he has recently formed a design studio with fellow DC area designer Andrew Merlo – studioSML.com .
Having to travel to Crystal City admittedly more than I’d like (it’s the closest branch of my bank), I think there’s something fascinating about it, actually. It reminds me of some kind of unrealized cyberpunk future and is one of the reasons I often jokingly refer to Arlington as “Tokyo In Miniature”.
Sorry, I see nothing beautiful in Crystal City.
See I find Crystal City really appealing on rainning and cold days, and now that there is the new outward facing street retail, it strikes a nice mix for me. I imagine up further north, designs like this are more common?
I sort of agree with JD, but if it were built even earlier in the century it could be such a cool retro visionary experience. Almost like Jetson’s fully realized. Instead it’s these hulking impersonal 70’s buildings for the most part.
I work here in Crystal City and the “givernment corridor” feeling is indeed the overarching impression, helped by legions of uniformed military and defense contractor types with ID badges. I can’t blame the mall for catering to it customer base. The area is slowly being redeveloped with lots more residential, so perhaps in a dozen years we’ll feel differently about the place.
I bike down to Crystal City as a stop on my bike ride fitness regime, and I’m strangely drawn to the place, actually. It’s very 1970s, but with enough of a budget that it doesn’t look cheap. It reminds me of Epcot in Orlando, where it’s beautiful in a way that I normally associate with non-beauty. Moreover, while I applaud the redevelopment to make it even more pedestrian/people/life friendly, I don’t think they should throw out the baby with the bathwater. They are stuck with the 1970s curve style. They built Tron, for real. They should stick with it.
If you cross Route 1, 23rd Street presents a fairly pleasant Main Street, with a few shops and restaurants. The restaurants on the west side of Crystal Drive between 20th and 23rd Streets are a nice effort, but they are undermined by the suburban office park designs of the buildings on the other side of the street.
Maybe you should visit more than twice before writing on the subject. That said, it’s unclear what your point is. Is it a critique of the original designers? Of the landlord (most of it is owned and managed by Vornado realty trust)? Of the current long-term plan?
You didn’t even mention the long-term planning board that Crystal City has, the Crystal City Business Improvement district, or the history of the shops. Did you see many people around while you in Crystal City on a weekend? Of course you didn’t, because it has more far more office space than residential. It is 9-5 with the exception of 23rd Street and Crystal Drive restaurants. The long-term planning board is to increase the residential share to help Crystal City become a 24 hour destination.
In short, it’s nice to see an article on Crystal City, but do more research.
As a (temporary) resident of Crystal City, I’ve been to the Water Park several times, and my impression is that it’s in keeping with the rest of Crystal City — completely uninspired. I’ll go back to give the bamboo sculptures another chance, though.
As for “calming oasis,” I guess that’s relative. It is, after all, hard against the railroad tracks and the frequent rumble of freight and VRE trains. That’s okay; what’s more problematic is that there are speakers nestled among the shrubbery, piping out pop music and smooth jazz and the sort of Norah Jones tunes you’ve heard over and over at the mall, when all you really want is to listen to the water.
I came across a 70s Washington Post article on Crystal City recently in which a photograph of the Underground was accompanied by this caption: “The Crystal City dweller walks past shops to the appropriate elevator. Wherever he goes, soft music follows. He never needs an overcoat.” Funny how appropriate that caption still is. I take the elevator down to the lobby of my apartment building, where the music starts, walk through the corridors of the adjacent Marriott, where the music continues, descend into the Underground — more music — and surface at the Water Park to more music still. It really blunts the senses.
And yet despite CC’s overall blandness, it somehow manages to be an interesting place to talk (and argue) about, if not actually live in.