Diagonals, Vistas, and Canals: Tracing L’Enfant’s Influences Beyond D.C.

This is a guest post by Ava Wilcox, an Intern in the Geography and Map Division.

In the history of American city planning, Washington, D.C., stands out. Designed by the eccentric and temperamental French-born architect Pierre Charles L’Enfant (1754–1825), the nation’s capital is one of the only entirely pre-planned cities completed on American soil. When L’Enfant joined by George Washington (1732–1799) and surveyor Andrew Ellicott (1754–1820) arrived at the site in 1790—Congress had instructed Washington to lay out the capital on the border of Maryland and Virginia near the Potomac River—they found little more than a collection of rural farmsteads. Although nearby Alexandria and Georgetown were already settled, they were not particularly dense. For L’Enfant this presented an essentially blank canvas upon which he could impose his top-down vision for the national capital’s urban design. Washington, D.C., was to be a planned and perfected city.

Broadly speaking, L’Enfant’s ideas came to fruition. Visit D.C. today and you will find broad avenues, public squares, roundabout intersections, triangular plots of land, frequent vistas of the Capitol and Washington Monument, and a long rectangular patch of grass surrounded by government buildings known as the Mall—these were all features of the L’Enfant plan.

But L’Enfant did not design Washington in a vacuum. Having been educated in some of Europe’s top art schools, L’Enfant was influenced by the architecture of his home continent. In fact, during the initial planning phase, he wrote to Thomas Jefferson to request maps of London, Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, Naples, Venice, and Florence. Although the exact maps sent by Jefferson are now unknown, L’Enfant’s correspondence indicates that they served as a jumping-off point for his design.

Did the canals of Amsterdam inform Washington, D.C.’s canal system? In London, did the separation of government (housed at Westminster near St. James’s Park) from the main commercial district (highlighted in pink on the map below) inspire L’Enfant’s Mall?

L’Enfant is also said to have visited Versailles, the French King’s rural castle complex, as a child. Designed by famed landscape architect André Le Nôtre (1613–1700), the gardens’ diagonal arteries and central canal make it reminiscent of Washington.

After being unceremoniously fired from the D.C. project, L’Enfant quickly found work planning another American town. Owned and operated by Alexander Hamilton’s Society for Establishing Usefull Manufactures (SUM), Paterson, New Jersey, was created as a model for American domestic industry. However, L’Enfant abandoned this venture too, and maps of the town reveal a relatively unambitious street layout.

At the turn of the 19^th century and approximately 500 miles west of Paterson, another U.S. city was finding its footing. Detroit was a longtime trading outpost first inhabited by the French, later the British, and eventually the Americans. As the capital of the new Territory of Michigan, the federal government began appointing state officials and funding the construction of public buildings in 1805. That was until a disastrous fire broke out.

During the Fire of 1805, every building in Detroit except one burned to the ground. Although it was catastrophic, the fire did provide the new crop of government officers sent by Congress a blank slate with which they could carry out their own urban planning ideas. It was within this context that Augustus Woodward’s Plan for the Town of Detroit, better known as the Woodward Plan, developed.

Woodward, an attorney by trade, was sent to Michigan to serve as the territory’s first Chief Justice. Woodward had previously lived in D.C. where he met with L’Enfant. The visual similarities between his plan for Detroit, which was completed with assistance from surveyor Thomas Smith, and D.C. are striking. Like D.C., the Woodward Plan emphasized broad radial avenues intersecting at circular nodes. The layout was comprised of a series of interlocking equilateral triangles with the idea that additional triangular modules would be added as Detroit grew.

Unfortunately for Woodward, despite early success designing the radial Grand Circus Park, Detroit never finished constructing his triangles, and the city transitioned to a typical grid system instead.

In 1820, an Indiana State Legislature-appointed committee purchased forested land near White River and Fall Creek for the new state capital Indianapolis. Alexander Ralston, a surveyor who had worked with L’Enfant in D.C., was appointed to assess and lay out the site. Ralston’s design measured approximately a mile on each side and was divided by two diagonal avenues that met in a circular drive at the city’s center. The central circle was initially reserved for the Governor’s House and is now home to the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. As in D.C., Indianapolis’s radial arteries were named after U.S. states: Massachusetts, Virginia, Kentucky, and Indiana. Plots were reserved for the State House and Court House as well as commercial and religious institutions.

L’Enfant’s influence was not isolated to the United States. Pre-planned national capitals in Australia, India, and Brazil took varying levels of inspiration from their American counterpart.

The Australian capital Canberra was designed by Chicago-born architect Walter Griffin in 1912. Griffin used the natural topography to organize his system of interlinking circular and radial drives.

In India, following the British Empire’s 1911 declaration that the capital would be relocated, officials led by Edwin Lutyens created a district within Delhi for government activities. They called the area New Delhi.

Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, was developed in the late-1950s by an idealistic group of planners and architects, Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer chief among them. Originally designed to afford all residents equal space, Brasilia has since been criticized for its social inequality and car-centric design.

The forms urban spaces take are the result of years of accumulated human decisions, both planned and not. Comparing urban centers allows us to disentangle the various motivations and influences that have shaped everyday life in the world’s cities.

Learn More:

• Read about L’Enfant’s troubles in D.C. in this 2022 Worlds Revealed blog post.
• Compare and contrast the planning of modern capital cities with Wolfgang Sonne’s book Representing the State: Capital City Planning in the Early Twentieth Century.
• For a comprehensive account of American urban planning from European inspirations to the City Beautiful movement, check out John Reps’ The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States.