Breathing Life Into Northern Virginia's Notorious 'Concrete Canyon'

Directly across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., lies a neighborhood called Rosslyn. It’s an aggressively urbanized part of Arlington, Virginia, and it’s one of the least-inspiring places to visit around the U.S. capital. Office towers built in the architectural style of blah crowd the land, and though there is a scenic waterfront, the highly trafficked George Washington Memorial Parkway keeps most people away. As for culture, there’s one theater and that’s about it.

Is there any way to breathe some life into what locals sometimes call the “concrete canyon”? That’s uncertain, but students at Virginia Tech’s Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center have given it a try with an ambitious attempt at reinventing the Rosslyn waterfront. Their goal was to make the neighborhood a pleasant destination with hypothetical amenities like public pools, floating food barges, and better bike paths (but no gondolas). They also tried to improve access to the river, which currently resists visitation with a bevy of dangers well-illustrated by Runyu Ma’s graphic, “Ways to Die Getting to Waterfront”: