Capitol Street, Washington DC, in winter. Photo by Will SelmanWILL SELMAN    FEB. 21, 2018To the extent anyone thinks about the layout and pattern of streets in Washington DC (and really, who doesn’t?), the common perception is that there are two systems at work. First, a basic grid arrangement of streets running north-south and east-west, and a second wheel-and-spoke pattern of avenues connecting significant architectural or topographical features around the city. And for visitors, how confusing it can be. But aside from the obvious look of the city with its grand avenues set at angles to the underlying grid, the grid itself has always struck me as unusual. The gridded streets are not uniformly arranged, resulting in a variety of block sizes and shapes; large and small, square and rectangular, oriented either vertically or horizontally. Ah! I thought to myself, Pierre L’Enfant, who designed the city, intended to create so much variety! And so I started to write an article on this syncopated street pattern of Washington DC. I imagined the design intended to create a variety of opportunities for the development of large or small buildings, on larger or smaller parcels of land, for all the unknown uses and activities that the future of the city might require. Who can truly know what the future might bring? L’Enfant showed great foresight in this, I imagined; by contrast our conventional suburbia of today lacks this sort of versatility. And I saw a metaphor in this for us all, as we go about planning our personal lives for our individual unknown futures.

Then just in time to stop me from making too great a fool of myself, I stumbled across Nicholas Mann’s fantastic book, The Sacred Geometry of Washington DC. It showed me just how wrong I’d been about L’Enfant’s intentions, and what an absolutely astonishing design he produced, which has remained hidden until Mann’s work uncovered it. This book should be required reading for every urban planner, or anyone with an inter