Walking Tour: Sixteenth Street & Adams Morgan

Less than two miles north of the White House, DC’s Northwest neighborhoods feel a world away from the towering monuments and expansive boulevards of downtown Washington. Sixteenth Street and Adams Morgan have long been recognized for their rich history and cultural diversity. Home to ambassadors and politicians, revolutionaries and civil rights leaders, these neighborhoods have hosted and housed every type of District resident, from working class to social elite. Visit one of Washington’s best hidden oases, hear stories of movers and shakers, protests, disasters, social scandals, and get off the beaten path!

Our tour begins in Meridian Hill Park, one of Washington’s best urban oases. We’ll uncover little known memorials, wind through back paths, and discuss the enterprising woman who envisioned a diplomatic paradise in the heights of Washington. We’ll see the only female equestrian statue in the city and might even catch a drum circle.

After leaving Meridian Hill Park, we’ll stroll up 16th Street, the “spine” of the District, to have a look at historic mansions, embassies, apartment homes, churches, and even a Masonic temple. Turning west toward Adams Morgan, we’ll take a short detour into charming Lanier Heights to see the cutest fire station in town. Finally we’ll head down 18th street, to the beating heart of Adams Morgan and Northwest Washington.

Where to Meet
1559 W St NW

What to Bring
Sturdy walking shoes, bottled water and comfortable clothes are recommended!

In partnership with DC Design Tours

Walking Tour: Cleveland Park & Cathedral Grounds

Explore Washington’s original streetcar suburb, plus the grounds of the National Cathedral!

Dubbed “The Queen of the Washington Suburbs” in 1903, Cleveland Park is one of Washington’s most beautiful and architecturally eclectic neighborhoods. From pastoral farmland, to the summer escape of wealthy Washingtonians, to one of the first “streetcar suburbs,” Cleveland Park is well worth exploring. Named for Presidential resident Grover Cleveland, the neighborhood boasts fanciful Victorian mansions, gorgeous gardens, and the second largest cathedral in the United States.

Visit the National Cathedral grounds, stroll along picturesque tree lined streets, see the oldest home in DC, and experience the city like a local.

Where to Meet
3101 Wisconsin Avenue NW

What to Bring
Sturdy walking shoes, bottled water and comfortable clothes are recommended!

In partnership with DC Design Tours

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Film Screening: We Start With the Things We Find

If we pay enough attention to the ordinary, we see the extraordinary. The shipping container is an accidental icon of our modern age: the eight-foot-by-forty-foot corrugated steel box that brings the world to our doorstep. The design studio LOT-EK is a visionary practice at the intersection of art and architecture that specializes in upcycling. The shipping container is the thing that has captured their imagination for over a quarter-century: they have remade containers into homes, schools, galleries, libraries, and more. With hundreds of millions of obsolete and unused containers around the world, this is a new and necessary architecture of the future, that repairs and regenerates the unnatural environment that we have inherited from the past. We Start With the Things We Find is a feature-length documentary of this vision, and of the soulful lifelong partnership of the people, designers Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, behind it.

 

Presented as part of the 2024 DC Environmental Film Festival:

DCEFF has been the premier Festival showcase of environmental films since 1993. Each March in Washington, DC, we bring the world’s largest green film festival to massive in-person audiences. Since 2020, we have focused on extending our reach beyond DC to the entire world with our virtual Festivals and ever-growing Watch Now catalog. In 2023, we were extremely excited to return to venues across the DC Metro for in-person screenings and events — in addition to continuing to offer year-round virtual programming for our audiences around the world.

Gallery Talk: Tips & Tricks for Lowering Your Carbon Footprint at Home

Join us for this gallery talk in conjunction with the exhibition, Cooling the Planet one Step at a Time: 15 Ways to Reduce Your Home Carbon Footprint.

The thought of lowering your carbon footprint and doing good for the environment can seem overwhelming at first. In this talk Jaime will present 10 strategies for tackling this challenge at home and will provide resources for creating your own personal decarbonization roadmap. You will walk away feeling empowered with the knowledge and tools to get started!

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Jaime Van Mourik, Associate AIA, LEED AP, is the director of the U.S. Department of Energy Zero Energy Ready Home program in addition to serving as the Zero Energy Design Designation lead for the DOE Building Technologies Office. Each day she is working toward a zero carbon emissions future for all homes.

Jaime is passionate about educating people of all ages about the impacts of the built environment on their lives. She believes that providing knowledge and opportunities for action will result in true transformation. Prior to coming to DOE, she served as the vice-president for education solutions at the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) where she led a team to create and deploy education solutions for every learner whether that be a young child, a student pursuing a post-secondary degree or a professional looking to advance in their career path. She collaborated with higher education institutions and advocates across the country to develop and deliver innovative learning platforms that integrate sustainability and green building concepts into curriculum and create pathways to professional credentials. She has extensive experience leading colleges and universities looking to “go green,” guiding them through the planning and implementation process and advising on how the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system can help shape sustainability initiatives in teaching, research and practice.

She holds a bachelor's degree in architecture from Virginia Tech and master's in architectural history from the University of Virginia and teaches part-time at The Catholic University of America.

Society of Architectural Historians Latrobe Chapter Symposium: The Architecture of Food

Fourteenth Biennial Symposium
Co-hosted by the Latrobe Chapter, Society of Architectural Historians & D.C. Preservation League

Boozy brunch, spongy injera dinners, empanada midnight snacks—modern residents of the nation’s capital enjoy a dynamic food center, noted for its variety of culinary experiences and foods authentic to the region, including half smokes, mumbo sauce, and crabcakes. Less explored is how this culinary geography intersects with the built environment, and how those intersections have changed over time. From farms and agricultural homesteads that supplied historic markets to ethnic food enclaves fostered by DC’s role as the capital, the city is an experiment in democracy, architecture and flavor. How has the Washington metropolitan area facilitated the production and dissemination of foodstuffs across the region? How have patterns of work shaped patterns of eating? How does a focus on food generate new types of research methodologies? 

Click here for full symposium schedule

Click here for more details

SYMPOSIUM ON K-12 OUTREACH: Approaches, Challenges, and Successes

The K-12 Symposium is hosted by the Washington Architecture Foundation at the District Architecture Center (DAC). to establish a network and community of common interest regarding raising awareness of architectural practice and the impact of architecture with the K-12 demographic. Goals for the symposium include sharing of best practices and problem solving tools in a manner that positions existing and prospective programs for success.

1911 Capitol Hill House Tour

  • Date

    Thursday, April 04 2024

  • Time

    5:00pm - 7:00pm

  • Location

    Private Home on Capitol Hill

Construction tour of a 1911 Capitol Hill home undergoing an extensive modernization and restoration. The house was designed by noted architect Clement A. Didden and was previously used as a boardinghouse and a rectory over it’s lifetime. The tour will be led by the architect and builder on the project, Colleen Healey, AIA and John Allen of Allen Built, Inc. The tour will focus on approaches to working with historic homes including casing detailing & preserving, creative solutions to modernizing a classical floor plan, working around existing infrastructure and upgrading the energy efficiency (including AeroSeal technology) within a historic context. The project is in final stages of construction.

Presented by:

Colleen Healey, Healey Architecture
Colleen Gove Healey, AIA has almost 20 years of architectural experience in the DC Metro region and throughout the East coast. She has won over 50 local and national design awards for both residential and commercial design. Colleen’s work is published in dezeen, Home and Design, Interior Design Magazine, Enki, Washingtonian Magazine, Dwell, Architecture DC, Residential Design Magazine, AD, Living Etc and The Washington Post

 

John Allen, AllenBuilt

John Allen is President of AllenBuilt, Inc, a boutique, industrious general contractor and design/build firm serving the Washington DC metro area. They develop and build creative solutions for one-of-a-kind commercial and residential projects.

 

Organized by:

Capital Area Custom Residential Architects Network

Nomination Deadline for 2024 Awards for Great People

  • Date

    Sunday, May 05 2024

  • Time

    5:00pm

The Washington Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA|DC) and Washington Architectural Foundation (WAF) are proud to present Awards for Great People. Each year, our Fall Design Fête celebrates these individuals and their work in making Washington better through their contributions as architects, advocates, educators, clients and partners.

Centennial Medal
Glenn Brown Award
John 'Wieb' Wiebenson Award
Emerging Architects Award
Architectural Educator Award 
Public Service Award 
Partnership for the Planet Award 

Laureates are selected annually by the Awards for Great People Jury, comprised of at least two members of AIA|DC and two members of WAF who shall be appointed by the Presidents of both organizations. The jury may select more than one laureate, or no laureates, per award in a given year and may consider nominations from prior years and nominations of its own.

Eligibility, nomination and submission requirements for each award are further detailed here. There are no fees required for submission. Unless noted otherwise, posthumous awards may not be given.

Nominations for 2024 are due by 5:00 PM on May 5, 2024. Submit completed nominations via email to Mary Fitch at mfitch@aiadc.com.

Gallery Talk: Home on Earth

Join us for a gallery talk in conjunction with our latest exhibition, Cooling the Planet one Step at a Time: 15 Ways to Reduce Your Home Carbon Footprint.

The founders of BLDUS will present recently completed houses from around the DC region that feature natural materials and embody an environmentalist ethos that prioritizes the health of a building's inhabitants equally to land from which its materials originated. BLDUS seeks opportunities in economies of scale, of scope, of density, of means, and of materials, integrating traditional construction methods with new technologies and organic materials ideally suited to their region--in Appalachia and Tidewater, that means wood, bark, cork, wool, mycelium, willow, hemp, bamboo, and stone--to create an architecture of accommodation. In 2023 BLDUS was honored with a Vanguard Award from Architectural Record and in 2019 with a Young Architect Award from The Architect's Newspaper.

Presenters: Andrew Linn and Jack Becker

Andrew Linn is co-principal and co-founder of BLDUS, an Anacostia-based architecture and development practice that operates throughout the Mid-Atlantic region, making healthy buildings that pay tribute to their context and gain integrity as they age. With a BArch from Cornell University and an MA in the History of Science and Medicine from Yale University, Andrew has taught at Virginia Tech, the University of Maryland and the Catholic University of America, and has previously worked for OMA, Tigerman McCurry, Fantastic Norway, and Arquitectonica.


Jack Becker is co-principal and co-founder of BLDUS, an Anacostia-based architecture and development practice that operates throughout the Mid-Atlantic region, making healthy buildings that pay tribute to their context and gain integrity as they age. Jack is a fourth-generation licensed architect and holds a B.Arch from Cornell University and a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard GSD. He has previous experience in architecture, development, and construction, and was awarded an AIA Young Architect Award in 2021.

This program is presented in association with Cooling the Planet one Step at a Time: 15 Ways to Reduce Your Home Carbon Footprint, on view at the District Architecture Center through April 26, 2023.

April Kids Workshop: Create Your Own Collage- With Artist Adrienne Moumin

Meet Adrienne Moumin—photographer, collage artist, and educator. Adrienne creates intricate collages with photographs of simple structures. Follow Adrienne on a fun-filled journey through her collage-making world. Then, pick a photo of a building in DC and make it into a collage with your own artistic style! Art supplies, including small frames, are provided by the Washington Architectural Foundation.

This program is intended for ages 8 to 12. Attendance is limited to 12 children.