Mid-Century Neighborhoods Tour
Washington, DC's suburban neighborhoods are largely defined by their early to mid-20th century detached dwellings reflecting a wide variety of Revival-style buildings from the popular Colonial Revival styles to more picturesque Tudor and Mediterranean-style residences. Within these traditional neighborhood settings, however, are pockets of Mid-Century houses that were either privately commissioned or part of speculative developments. Largely constructed between the late 1940s up through the early 1970s, most of these houses were designed by locally and nationally acclaimed architects, many of whom taught at or were former students at the Howard University School of Architecture.
This tour takes you to several such neighborhoods where clusters of Mid-Century Modern houses can be found tucked into wooded sites or banked into hillsides. The houses share common design features based upon a Modern aesthetic, such as open floor plans, low-lying massing with flat and/or sloped roofs, expansive use of windows and minimal ornamentation. They also emphasize the use of a variety of materials and textures and are often designed around landscaped courts and terraces and are oriented to take advantage of expansive views, cross ventilation and the rays of the sun. Generally modest in size, these Mid-Century Modern houses are now increasingly threatened by demolition and replacement by newer and larger houses. The loss of many of the District's Mid-Century Modern houses has inspired the DC Historic Preservation Office to identify and document those that do survive. Those findings have contributed to this tour.
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Chain Bridge Road and University Terrace Modern Mecca: Mid-Century Neighborhoods Tour
Beginning in the 1940s, Chain Bridge Road and University Terrace in the Palisades became a hot bed of Modern residential design. The difficult terrain with its steep inclines, expansive views and unhindered exposures, lent itself well to the tenets of emerging Modernism.
Mid-Century Forest Hills: Mid-Century Neighborhoods Tour
In a city that was generally apprehensive about Modern design, the Forest Hills neighborhood on upper Connecticut Avenue came to embrace it. Well over fifty Mid-Century houses were built there during the late 1950s and '60s where most still remain neatly tucked into the hilly and wooded terrain.
Mid-Century Eastland Gardens: Mid-Century Neighborhoods Tour
For the first quarter century of its life as a residential neighborhood, Eastland Gardens was defined by its Revival-style dwellings. In the early to mid-1950s, Black architects and builders moved away from the traditional and instead introduced a more Modern house form and style to the middle-class neighborhood.
Modern Crestwood: Mid-Century Neighborhoods Tour
Beginning in 1950, when Black Washingtonians began moving into Crestwood--formerly an all-White, racially restricted neighborhood--they not only altered its socio-racial character, but they also introduced a new and Modern design aesthetic and gave Crestwood one of the most important collections of Mid-Century Modern residences in the District.
Mid-Century North Portal Estates: Mid-Century Neighborhoods Tour
The 1950s development of North Portal Estates in upper northwest, DC initially catered to a largely Jewish home buyer, but within its first decade of development, it became attractive to African Americans. Both cultural groups had a predilection for the Modern, appropriately introducing split level ramblers and more unique mid-Century dwelling forms into the hilly and wooded terrain adjacent to Rock Creek.
Chevy Chase Cluster: Mid-Century Neighborhoods Tour
In 1954-56, in an unusual speculative development scheme, developers, Waggaman & Brawner commissioned the architecture firm of Corning & Moore to design a collection of similar, but unique modern houses within the more traditional, Colonial Revival-style residential neighborhood of Chevy Chase.
Michigan Park Modern: Mid-Century Neighborhoods Tour
In a two-block area sandwiched between Bunker Hill Road, Michigan Avenue, 19th and 20th Streets NE, sits a cluster of Mid-Century Modern ranch houses all designed by the architecture firm of Brown & Wright, the city's most prolific Mid-Century residential architecture firm.
Modern Hillcrest: Modern Hillcrest: Mid-Century Modern Neighborhoods Tour
Along a stretch of a very steep Hillcrest Drive in the Hillcrest neighborhood of southeast DC rise eight tall and striking two-story Mid-Century houses. The houses, with their rigid geometric forms and features, perch incongruously atop the rugged hill.