One For All: A Capitol Proposal

June 26, 2020 marked the passing of H.R.51 through the House of Representatives, a historic moment in the long fight for DC's statehood. This fight is not merely anchored by an argument about taxation without representation; it is centered on returning voting rights removed from the nation's capital nearly 230 years ago. Statehood is an argument about the reparations of equality being given to a city built on the institution of slavery, embracing parts of a city divided by borders visible and hidden, and revealing cultural contexts hidden in plain sight behind the federal city. Given this complex background, there were numerous essential elements that were paramount to a critical study of what a 51st state capitol building should include.

Though this self-designed brief raised a number of questions, none was more central than the relationship between aesthetics and representation within the typology of the American state capitol. The architecture of politics is often the built manifestation of ideals, policies, and values. In times of discord and unrest, we are reminded that architecture can represent the core systems of a society, exhibiting underlying truths that may have been ignored or intentionally concealed. There can be an architecture of slavery as much as an architecture of freedom. There can be architectures of oppression as well as architectures of democracies. The natural starting point for the project began with a comprehensive survey of U.S. state capitols, which share a lineage of classical architectural elements and styles inextricably linked to the Founding Father's desire to embed the United States with an origin story descending from the aesthetic, political, and social ideals of ancient Western civilizations. This thesis asks, for a (new) state that has been denied representation for over 200 years, should these same architectural ideals be embedded in its state building, or should a different symbology, aesthetics, materiality, or origin story be reoriented and introduced?

However, it also became clear that site selection would be of critical importance to this project. The result of months of research led me to believe that although the building's aesthetic decisions might challenge normative architectural forms, the appropriate site for a Washington, Douglass Commonwealth State Capitol would also be one that honored and found its place within the context of Washington's symbolic plan. The site of RFK Stadium was ultimately selected because of its accessibility, its planned demolition, and its alignment with the United States Capitol. Through its placement as the epilogue to L'Enfant's unfinished plan for Washington, this site not only recognizes the importance of history and lineage, but also reorients the new state government's political nucleus, ultimately presenting ideas about freedom and democracy through a contemporary interpretation of the classic state capitol's form and planning.

Overall, this thesis seeks not to be a final answer, but an investigation of some of the critical issues involved in this topic, a proposal of dissent from the expectations of systematic oppression, and an invitation to start a dialogue about a complex, multifaceted, and prescient design prompt.