My book, at some point, you know, i call him a genius at one point. We always argue about whether the term is overused, but one of the pieces of that description is the enormous speed with which with which he worked. Enormous speed from which he went from zero to 60. From a blank landscape to this. This is not just a sketch. This is a rigorous exploration of the possibility of this made into a physical form. The second essential fact about this drawing is that we recognize that today, given that he worked on it for five months, given that he left the project after 11 months, given that almost nothing on this plan was put into place not just in the next decade after its creation but in the next six to seven decades after its creation, the fact that you and i can all sit in here and place ourselves on it. Place the capital. Place the white house. The fact that we recognize these avenues, those people who have lived in d. C. For quite a while you can recognize the streets in this plan bending and places that they do not bend in your experience. That when we visit the Lincoln Memorial, we are out in the middle of what this plan calls the Potomac River, right there. That when we visit the jefferson it is the same thing. But we recognize it. This piece of, this work of art made in five months has an do or enduresd for two centuries. This is, in fact, his great accomplishment, the thing about which he would only be faintly remembered. There are many misconceptions about him in this plan for d. C. One of those misconceptions is that he was trained and came over to america as an engineer. He was not. He was an artist, trained at the Royal Academy of painting and sculpture in paris. He came over attached to a group of french engineers, but he was a 22yearold attached to it because of his family connections. Every young man with connection to the court of louis the 15th wanted to get to america. Lafayette is the classic example. Trying to achieve a glory for france that they had not been able to achieve for several decades prior to this. They were burning for glory. He was attached to the group as an artist. He would follow engineers around, and when they needed sketches of fortifications or of the landscape or of an existing town, he would work very quickly, accurately, and well. He was an artist. Turns out he was probably more of an artist than any of the engineers who quickly went back to france could have ever imagined. In the eight years since ive written this book, since it was published, i have been more and more interested in that. This plan as a work of art. City planning is a work of art. This document, in fact appropriate to show you in a space like this as it would be anywhere else. What does it mean to talk about a city plan as a work of art . On the final page, which i will get to, i describe it as the first great artistic achievement that could truly be called american. Im not the first one to say that. John coleridge called John Coolidge called it the first work of western art of International Importance produced in or for america. To dig deeper into this notion of a work in our of art. Im on the english faculty, i teach world literature. To dig into this notion of the city plan as a work of art, i will borrow two definitions of art from bloomberg dont you go humberto biko. In one description he defines the novel as a machine for generating interpretation. In the other he talks about the poetic effect and calls it the capacity to attempt displays of continuing to generate different readings without ever being completely consumed. I love those two descriptions of art. He covers a great deal in those descriptions. He uses the word machine to mean a made thing that continues to itself make things. Generates a selection of readings producing an ongoing argument about meaning that can go on the. It can seem neverending. The longer that these arguments go on, the more distant they are from the original act of the creator. The more difficult it is to suss out the intent of the creator, which leads to a different data questions that we apply to d. C. All the time but with which every artistic this up and wrestles, how much allegiance do we owe the artists intentions in the reading of a work . This happens in every class. How much do we Pay Attention to what the artist wanted and how much do we Pay Attention to what we get out of it . At what point does the importance of the artists intention begin to receive and be replaced by other concerns . These are tantalizing questions for d. C. The great city is like a great novel, full of plots, subplot, symbolic objects, central and peripheral characters, washington dc is certainly no exception. Subject to an incredibly wide range of readings over the years , some of them brilliant, some of them useful, some of the wishful, some of the maddening. As the city has been shaped and reshape overtime. The work of art is first and foremost a product of expression and, as a product of expression, it requires the artist to be articulate in whatever form the medium requires. This is where lenfant becomes an especially interesting cases we seek to tease out his meaning, he was at the same time and normal sleep articulate and inarticulate. In the language of drawn lines he probably had no peer or very few peers in the United States or revolutionary era. This was not a country of artists. At that time. However, in the language of words, especially the english language, lenfant faced an enormous challenge, one that he failed to meet often spectacularly. Over in the Manuscript Division in congress, his papers are very tough going. Not just because of the attempt to read the handwriting, but because of the work involved in putting together his syntax and grammar. There is this apocryphal but almost verifiable story that George Washington once commented to lenfant about the difficulty of understanding him in english, to which lenfant then said he was no better in french. [laughter] anybody researching lenfant runs into this, but that handicap did not prevent them from producing tens of thousands of written words about the federal city before, during, and long after his work on the project. This is an interesting way to narrate our way through the project. He produced two draft plans, maybe three, before this one that are lost to history. This is it. We have other things that he drew, but in terms of the federal city and actual plans, this is it. Weve got the final one, so thats good, but when we attempt to trace out the development of the federal city and the way that lenfant worked on it and what he was doing, we cannot rely in the drawings, even though everyone involved would have been relying on his drawings at least as their first lace to go for meaning. They had to go to his writing. These writings were produced in three forms. A fairly small collection of letters for the various involved and interested parties including jefferson, hamilton, and washington, along with a series of memorandums, most written to washington during his 11 months on the project. Probably at the behest of washington. And the nearly endless collection of memorials written to various bodies of Congress Area in his grievances regarding his shoddy treatment at the hands of the city commissioners, demanding what he felt was overdue payment for services. Many of these as we get into 1810 and 1820 get closer to his sad death, fractured, rambling incoherent, going on for pages and pages in their scattershot approach to grammar, vocabulary, and punctuation. Paradoxically the struggling with the language makes it more remarkable that for 30 years, as they would say in the media, his message stayed on point, ok . Expressed as a set of rationales, conceptual underpinnings, arguments, so consistently that there was little doubt about what did it did not make up his original position around the federal ditty. Even when his mind seemed to be letting go towards the end of his life, he never let go of certain things that he said over and over again. Three times in 1791, from the scene that i read to you, in august of 1791 over five months he spoken person with George Washington about his work on the plan, each time bearing a lengthy working summary of his thinking. We still have those. In georgetown on the 28th of 1791, three weeks after he arrived on the site. The text of this first accompanying memorandum contains a small but vital set of first decisions. He wrote about the european baroque tradition of city planning, if only implicitly, as he outlined the sense of the rio grande as truly beautiful, declaring himself an enemy of the tiresome and insipid grid exemplified by philadelphia. [laughter] and other cities. He revealed his predisposition for topographical from that led him to raise his eyes in what was a fairly level site. Especially the wooden slopes of what he called jenkins hill. We know it as capitol hill. He was already looking to imbue the capital with a sick malik significance this vote to its seemingly unlimited future. At this point he wrote and presumably spoke about the advantages of the anacostia, proposing the transformation of the ferry route connecting those two rivers. It kind of went like this. The transformation of that ferry road into the Great Central avenue called pennsylvania. His second memorandum was the first to accompany a full or plan to drawing in june of 1791 when he wrote up with a hurried draft of the plan devoted not to detailed street arrangements but to the distance and situation of objects. He was now thinking carefully about the arrangement of buildings, roads, the way that an entire chronology of development and this is a remarkable document when you work through the work of building and populating a city. He wrote it should be begun at , points equidistant as possible from the center. When he first got to georgetown, jeffersons instructions were look over all this territory about 6000 acres, and jeffersons instructions were to find a place to build a city. And just sort of think about not turning this into a city but find a place within this to build a city. And some of the key contenders were right here. We have baseball stadiums, soccer stadiums. Over here, where Lincoln Square is. Georgetown was over here. Finding what we would consider today as neighborhoods. One of the most Amazing Things in history lenfant, said to washington and wrote to washington, rather than place a city in a single location here lets make all of this a city. But lets not stop there. If you notice something fascinating about the plan and it is sort of hard to see on this version these roads up here. The roads all sort of fade out into the rest of the plan. Into the rest of the district. You can see the dotted lines here. All of these major avenues heading off into the rest of the district. He said we are going to fill the district, 100 square miles, and fill it with a million people. This is at a time when the city of paris and london had about 500,000. This is at a time when georgetown was about 3500 on the list of the top 25 largest cities in america. So to say this, to say we want to take Something Like paris and london and make it bigger, was in the strictest definition of the word, insane. [laughter] what is most interesting about this is washingtons reaction. If he had sat in a room with monroe and jefferson. There is no doubt that either of them would have been horrified and run off trying to figure out a way to stop lenfant from doing this. What is most interesting is washington said, proceed. Without any preparation for this , in a single meeting, washington said ok. There is a of discussion still to be had in future books and articles. There is a lot of discussion about not only washingtons role in this, because it was vital. We have an image and a welldeserved image of Thomas Jefferson being engaged in architecture and city planning. Go to mount vernon, look at the arrangement of spaces, understand as this is lenfants vision, think about it in relation to the Potomac River. Think about how concerned he was with the house and all the little tricks he played on the house to make it look bigger than it was. To think about George Washington doing that. To think about the arrangement and the relationship to the river. You start seeing a washington that has been very much undersold as both an architect and planner. He did not have the breadth of understanding that jefferson did. As a planner and architect, he was no slouch. That is what happens at that meeting. We have a scale here. The second meeting was to talk about how they would fill this. This did not happen, but this is what he outlined to George Washington. We were going to begin at parts equidistant to the center. And we are going to start with the squares and circles. He called them squares, whether they were rectangular or circular. He called them all squares. And dotted all over the plan. His idea was an intriguing one even today, if it seems a little unlikely to have succeeded. It was that the work would start with smaller villages growing up around this territory. And the first set of squares would be given, the land would be given, free of charge to the 13 existing original states and newly admitted vermont. It would be given to them, and the idea was that their congressional delegation would move to the square. And lenfant takes pages to outline this. They would move to that square, and around them naturally would , grow an infrastructure of goods, money, people, buildings. There would be a natural incentive to build it up and build it up well, creating a beautiful set of villages distributed throughout the plan. Would massachusetts want their intercity village to be inferior to north carolinas . No. Hes bens a lot of time talking about creating humanscale villages that over time form a city in his thinking. In his thinking, the spacing of the squares is important because each square would be visible from the next. And the left over would be for churches, memorial statues fountains, and other civic uses. At this point, the relationship of the city to the Potomac River and to the Eastern Branch this is an idea lenfant repeats over and over him his writings that has been lost today. One of the ideas that the relationship to the river, while we still very much you washington, d. C. As a river city , and where we celebrate that connection. We spend a lot of time and energy creating plans to do something about it. The reason it is hard for us to understand is because the Potomac River is half as wide as it was in 1791. All the difficult navigation and unsightly sandbars, slow sluggish water, eventually leads to the creation of the potomac park, among which the Lincoln Memorial and Vietnam Memorial now sit. In 1791, if you were to climb up to the top of jenkins hill today capitol hill, and look westward, the Potomac River would be 50 of your view. This today is where the Washington Monument since. There is a lovely little marker, as big as a carrier, that sits right about here. That marks the shore of the potomac. Where it once was. You would look over the Potomac River and look to the western bank of the river, but you are not looking at a bank, a sure. What you are doing is looking across the western expanse of the United States of america. The word we do not use in the same way today, as you well know, but a word that was used freely and happily in 1791 was empire. America was to move westward. This was not conquest. But the expression, free expression, of a democratic people. The representative body, the legislative body of government sitting here, we would be able to look westward. In fact, you can still see a bit of that today, if you squint. [laughter] once in some ways more interesting was the relationship of the Potomac River to the white house. It is really important for us to understand a lot of this process is casting our minds back to 1791. When this drawing was made, none of the following history had happened. We have to cast our mind back and think that, in 1791, that little phrase says president s house. That was synonymous with George Washington in 1791. This is before washingtons famous decision not to run for a third term. There is no doubt in anyones mind that the position would be washingtons until he died. Everyone expected washington to live a long and unusually healthy life. There is no doubt in many peoples minds that we were talking decades of washingtons presidency. Many decades. Only washington felt otherwise. He was not sure he was going to live that long. The rest of america was. The two contending names for several months for the city at the heart of the District Of Columbia were washington and the second choice was washingtonopolis. [laughter] and you have here then, in 1791, no whiff of term limits, a second president. This house was synonymous with the president ial seat of George Washington. It was not synonymous with a place that would change occupants every four or eight years. And i do not have a larger map of the region. But i know you can do this. If we watch the vista here, we go westward. Our empire makes its way. If we watch the vista here, on the Potomac River, lets talk about what is right here. Alexandria, which is what washington considered to be his hometown, the place he was from. Just down the bend, right about here, we have mount vernon which was the place he loved more than any other place in the world. He loved washington, d. C. , but he loved mount vernon more. The view down the Potomac River was a very personal view. It was, in some ways, not every way, but it was in some ways lenfants gift to washington. It did not hurt that the the little tiny blocks above the creek did create a little rise in the land that would allow a vista down the Potomac River. A personal view southw