Versailles on the Potomac

I first encountered Washington, D.C. on a ninth-grade field trip—the kind designed to teach a carefully curated history through carefully curated space. We saw the monuments, the museums, the grand avenues. We did not see the city in any ordinary sense. Even then, I sensed that this was intentional.

From the bus window, I remember turning to my friends and saying that the city looked like a movie set. We joked that the pedestrians must be paid actors, that the facades might fall backwards if you touched them too hard. It was the only language I had for something that felt so orchestrated, so monumental, and so unlike the dense, lived-in urban environment I was used to in New York. Washington felt awe-inspiring and intimidating, but also strangely hollow—never meant to operate at human scale.

To be clear, this is not a story about Washington “growing on me.” If warmth, informality, or livability were what I valued most in a city, I would have disliked it outright. This was not the case. I loved storytelling long before I loved cities, and Washington, D.C. was storytelling you could walk through. Every axis, every vista, every monumental structure felt like part of a deliberate narrative—one that asked to be read rather than inhabited.

Only later did I learn that this impression was not accidental. Pierre Charles L’Enfant envisioned a capital that could convey the magnitude and legitimacy of a new republican experiment, drawing heavily on the aesthetics of European power. His plan borrowed from André Le Nôtre’s formal landscape traditions and, more broadly, from the visual language of Versailles. This was undoubtedly an extraordinarily ironic choice for a nation defining itself in direct opposition to monarchy. 

Even before I had the vocabulary to articulate any of this, I understood that Washington was not a city in the sense I knew cities to be. It was not built primarily for life. It was built to be a statement, and the people who lived and moved within it felt incidental to that purpose. The contradiction fascinated me. How could a nation so committed, at least rhetorically, to Enlightenment secular governance and the people express itself through city planning anchored by pseudo-temples that could not be further from human scale?

The irony is difficult to ignore. The result is a city that appears not only ideologically inconsistent and spatially impractical, but also deeply revealing.

What struck me most, then and now, is that Washington was never really intended to be lived in the way other cities were. For much of its early history, statesmen arrived, conducted national business, and returned home. The capital functioned less as a settlement and more as a stage—one on which the nation could perform itself to its citizens and to the world. I realize now that this was what I recognized, albeit without the vocabulary, in 9th grade. It was truly, in effect, a movie set.

Even still, despite all of this—perhaps because of it—I loved it. I loved the beauty, and maybe even the audacity of trying to materialize national identity through space. I loved the way ideology hardened into stone and landscape. Washington was the first place that taught me cities could mean something rather than remain neutral backdrops for life.

That realization mattered more than whether I liked the city or not. It changed how I engaged with urban environments entirely. I began to understand that cities tell stories whether we want them to or not, and that planners and other place-makers choose which stories become permanent.

Frankly, I do not believe every city should aspire to be Washington. In fact, I think very few should. Growing up in New York has convinced me of the virtues of a relatively compact, uncomplicated grid—and of not needing to walk 160 feet to cross the street because Thomas Jefferson believed in“light and airy” avenues.

Despite this, encountering a city that prioritized narrative over livability is what first drew me to city planning. In fact, it was the reason I chose the major of City and Regional Planning at Cornell. It revealed to me the power of the built environment. Today, my interests lean more toward the pragmatics of housing and everyday urban life—but I still carry a soft spot for Washington’s impractical grandeur. It taught me how to read a city. Now, I feel that once you learn that cities are designed to mean something, you never stop reading.