Photos: A quick spruce up to make this new Amazon city less drab
Amazon tapped Crystal City, Virginia, as one of its next homes. But Crystal City is a bit drab, and its architecture brutalist, so the city's main developer sassed up the place with paint and some giant fabric building wraps. This particular one was among our favorites.
KUOW Photo/Carolyn Adolph
Crystal City, tapped last week to be one of Amazon’s new headquarters, is low on charm and big on boxy office buildings that come in Soviet gray or D.C. beige.
JBG Smith, which owns most of the buildings here, appears to have some self-awareness about this, because it splashed some color onto this nondescript suburb. It’s mostly fun-with-paint but you’ll see in the photos below that some buildings are covered in a sort of fabric to make them look less brutalist.
A resident told us that most of this happened a few weeks before the HQ2 announcement.
Not quite a wrapper's delight, but cheerier than the original facade.
KUOW Photo/Carolyn Adolph
Brightly colored buildings, like this one, have been covered in bright fabric to disguise their brutalist character. The pastel lawn spikes add stabs of color.
KUOW Photo/Carolyn Adolph
A crosswalk in Crystal City, Virginia, gets a light updo in light of its new status as the next host of an Amazon headquarters.
KUOW Photo/Carolyn Adolph
Not in Crystal City but of the essence: This is Jeff Bezos’s Washington, D.C., home, on S Street in the Kalorama neighborhood. The Obamas, the embassies of Ireland and Laos are close neighbors, as well as President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and husband Jared Kushner. This looks like one big house, but it's actually two buildings joined by an arched driveway. The project was supposed to be complete by this December but it was still ripped back to the studs.
KUOW Photo/Carolyn Adolph
A resident told us that these building wraps, most of the paint, and the little friendly signs ("Nice to see you") appeared in the last few weeks.
KUOW Photo/Carolyn Adolph
A building slated for demolition for Amazon's HQ in Arlington Virginia. The property is surrounded by condo and apartment towers.
KUOW Photo/Carolyn Adolph
Virginia is for lovers, clearly.
KUOW Photo/Carolyn Adolph
