Arthur Cotton Moore featured in “On the Waterfront” and “Our Town”

National Mall Coalition board member Arthur Cotton Moore was recently interviewed by two media outlets about his long career in architecture and his opinions on the current state of the National Mall and the history of Washington D.C. architecture.

On April 6, 2018, he appeared in studio for the podcast “Our Town” with Andy Ockershausen.

Highlights from the interview include:

On the development of Washington Harbour in Georgetown —

“Nobody could get to the waterfront in those days. Georgetown, it was an industrial slum . . . the rendering plant was there . . . the actual waterfront was horrible because they dumped all the concrete and the rest of it . . . when we started in there was a huge gravel plant . . . the whole idea was essentially open the whole thing up.”

On the National Mall Coalition and the McMillan Commission …

“Let me tell you . . . we have two or three projects . . .  related to the Mall . . .we counted up how many agencies, Congressional committees, and what I call fiefdoms that occur, and there are 37 of them, 37 of them!  And I’ve been to all of them. . .  I’m trying, and I’m with a group, the National Coalition on the Mall, and we are trying to get together a group that is not unlike the McMillan Commission of 1901, to take an oversight and a visionary view because we have, as I show in the last part of the book . . .  I’m showing an expansion of the Mall because when we looked at it, there were 41 museums and memorials that wanted to be on the Mall. I said if they were all built, it would like Forest Lawn Cemetery. It would just look terrible. So we have to expand it, and there has to be an expansion of the mall because that’s exactly what McMillan did.”

Listen to the full interview below.

In addition, Washington D.C. filmmaker and documentarian Tim Persinko created a 12-minute video interview earlier this year called “On the Waterfront with Arthur Cotton Moore” that featured the famed architect.

Topics touched upon in that segment include a history lesson on the creation of Washington DC, flooding in the city, living along the waterfront, his environmental sensibilities in design, and numerous highlights from his illustrious career.

Watch the full video below.

 

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