Last year I saw this tweet, and have been thinking about it for awhile:

Jake Anbinder @JakeAnbinder

I feel like a good urban history book could be written entirely around this photo

November 29th 2021

10 Retweets240 Likes

Here’s another one:

I’m going to come back to this to write about it at more length, and have been looking for some information about it. Once you notice this, you see it everywhere. You see these apartment buildings—taller than pretty much anything proposed today except in urban cores or suburban “edge cities” (looking at you, Tysons Corner)—just sort of right in the middle of low-rise suburban sprawl, lacking any connecting urban fabric. Almost all of the ones I’ve seen around the D.C. area are from the 1960s or 1970s.

That tracks with the fact that the 1970s and 1980s saw a huge number of “downzonings”—restricting what the zoning code permits to be built. The idea is that these large apartment buildings upset suburbanites so much that they forced a major change in what was allowed, and few were ever built after this period. Who knows how would have built in alternate universe without low-density codes? I wonder how different these suburban areas would look today, had these huge buildings 50 years ago been a starting point rather than a flash in the pan.

Here’s a major one in my area: the Skyline Towers in Bailey’s Crossroads, in Fairfax County, Virginia. (It’s also the site of an infamous, deadly construction accident.) The towers were built in the early 1970s, and the whole set of buildings (not all of them pictured) includes both apartments and condos. Here are a couple of views of the complex:

I’ve never seen any mention of the zoning and land-use issues surrounding these buildings. It’s a niche thing you’d have to search for to find. It’s an interesting, and unfortunate, hidden story in how suburbs could have been more inclusive and architecturally varied. Perhaps it’s also a lesson in urban design—these resemble “towers in a park” far more than a true urban fabric. They bring density, but they do nothing to alter the fundamentally suburban pattern.

As noted, I’ll be doing a second, longer piece on this. Have you noticed this pheneonon? Do you know anything about it in particular? Leave a comment!

Related Reading:

When Small Towns Wanted Tall Buildings

What If Suburbia Still Looked Like This?

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