'Timber!' on the historic lawn

The century-old grounds of the Capitol are on the chopping block. The nation's welcome mat is being rolled up, its landscape and trees hatcheted, and the historical legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted, who created this sacred place, obliterated.

As antiterrorist fervor infects Washington, the architectural fate of the place that says "America," is under assault. The nation's front lawn is succumbing to an excavation for a tourist center that destroys its historic and aesthetic past.

While the plan to re-contour the Capitol was hatched before the terrorist attacks, fears for national security have expanded its scope and $265 million budget into an overblown congressional concoction.

Its workers are proceeding from axing the likes of the "Abigail Adams" memorial tree to bulldozing 68 others as they replace the historic entry and view with a stairway plunging l8 feet below the earth to an elephantine visitor center three stories below the Capitol. Talk about your evil axes!

In its origins, this makeover met genuine needs. It supplied more security after the shooting of two Capitol guards in l998 and more space for waiting visitors. But the post-terrorist priority for surveillance has inflated that idea into a bunker-cum-theme park as a visitors center. This bloated tourist trade show, the size of 10 football fields, burrowing into the earth, will destroy "America's front lawn," the grounds of its greatest landscape architect.

Slowly, as word leaks out, Washingtonians, historians, and Olmsted fans have begun to rouse themselves to campaign against the desecration of decades of work by the founder of the profession and the altering of the sacred space and postcard place that elevates their Capitol. Many deplore the three-story, 588,000-square-foot structure with its pricey potpourri of orientation theaters, interactive elements, auditorium, and educational arenas, complete with restaurants and restrooms, and other big-ticket bric-a-brac enfolded with state-of-the-art surveillance.

To serve these Disneyesque antics, tree-chopping and "landscooping" will dismantle the best preserved, "most intact landscape" of the nation's premier placemaker, says Ellen Schillinglaw, project director for the Cultural Landscape Foundation. Olmsted's graceful double allée, where visitors could glimpse and promenade toward the dome that shelters their Congress, will become this "gaping hole," as landscape architects at Sasaki Associates follow orders to submerge the ceremonial, classical space and architects at RTKL build the bunker.

Today, the walks, the drives Olmsted executed after finishing Central Park in New York, endure. The paths and terraces remain. Its procession of harmonious spaces embrace the Capitol building. Not for long.

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