Washington, D.C.  

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Ill-Matched Lovers (c. 1520/1525) by Quentin Matsys is in the National Gallery of Art
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Ill-Matched Lovers (c. 1520/1525) by Quentin Matsys is in the National Gallery of Art

"The United States of America having won their independence as a nation, there was an immediate need for Government buildings. That they should be designed in the classical style naturally followed from the intimate relations which had grown up between the New Republic and France. When Washington had been selected as the seat of the National Government, it was a Frenchman, Major Pierre Charles l'Enfant, who laid out the city on a plan so convenient and ornamental, that it is strange no other city of America, with a similar chance of starting forth from the beginning, has emulated it. Instead, the general practice both with new cities and the extension of older ones, has been to adopt the gridiron plan of a repetition of parallel streets, cut at right angles by another repetition of parallels; a deadly monotonous system and far from convenient. For it makes no adequate provision for the gravitation of government, finance, and so forth to certain centres, which in consequence become inconveniently congested."--How to Study Architecture (1917) by Charles Henry Caffin


"Washington and Hollywood spring from the same DNA." -- Jack Valenti

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Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the Residence Act approved the creation of a capital district located along the Potomac River on the country's East Coast. As permitted by the U.S. Constitution, the District is under the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States Congress and is therefore not a part of any U.S. state.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Washington, D.C." or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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