Freewrite #4

Source #1

A. Paul L. Knox is the author. He is distinguished professor at Virginia Tech and has served as the dean of the College of Architecture and Urban Studies. He teaches classes on urban and regional development. I feel he has a slight bias because he lives close to Washington, D.C. This article was published in a Geographers journal.

B. The intended audience is public planners and architects designing in and around the Washington, D.C. area. I know this is aimed at this audience because it is analyzing what is already there not describing where the city is going.

C. The purpose is academic because it has formally been published in a National Journal.

D. I feel that most/all of Paul Krux’s writtings are very reliable and credible. It seems to be very valid and relevant to what I am looking at researching.

Source #2

A. This book is written by Nathan Glazer and Cynthia Field. Cynthia Field has written other publications about the National Mall and design. She seems to have a very extensive background about design and knows what she is talking about.

B. The intended audience are architects looking at Washington, D.C. People in the field who are looking to learn from D.C. or even build there.

C. The purpose is educational because it is informing the public of Washington, D.C.’s past and how they got here today.

D. I feel that this book is credible because the author has written multiple different documents about this topic. I feel this information to be current because it was written realatively recently. I sense a slight bias in the writing but nothing extreme because she is more enlightening us rather than just analyzing.

Washington, D.C. is a city that can bring a different thought to mind for different people. However, everyone seems to have a thought about it in some way. Most citizens would also not jump to the thought of ‘How was the city designed?’ This is one of the feats that make Washington, D.C. what it is today. The National Mall was an idea with roots dating back multiple centuries. In Nathan Glazer and Cylthia Field’s book, The National Mall, they say, “It has its origins in Thomas Jefferson’s own clever sketch plan for the city, which he made the last week of March 1791, at the very moment L’Enfant was beginning his preliminary survey of the city’s site” (13). This careful planning has made the National Mall an international icon and a staple of this nations capital. It is a place where people can come together and feel support for something that they believe in. In Paul Knox’s “The Restless Urban Landscape: Economic and Sociocultural Change and the Transformation of Metropolitan Washington, DC,” he begins to establish what the National Mall has been used for. “The central premise is that the built environment is both the product of, and the mediator between, social relations” (182). To different people the National Mall means something different, however, to most people it is the connector between government and its people. This small piece of open land in the nations capital shapes the behavior of an entire culture. Without the mall such tremendous events would not have had the impact that they still posses today.

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