Washington DC Cityscape — 3D Map of the L'Enfant City

Washington DC was built to a plan — and not just any plan. In 1791, French engineer Pierre Charles L'Enfant laid out a federal capital from scratch on the northern shore of the Potomac River, overlaying a Baroque system of diagonal avenues and ceremonial circles onto a rectangular street grid. The result is one of the most deliberate and geometrically distinctive cities in the world, and one whose logic reads with exceptional clarity from directly above.

This model covers the heart of that plan at 1:5000 scale, stretching from the White House in the south to Dupont Circle and Logan Circle in the north, and from 20th Street NW in the west to 12th Street NW in the east. Cast in white resin and mounted in an oak frame, the collision of L'Enfant's diagonal avenues with the underlying rectangular grid — and the circles placed at their intersections — is immediately legible across the entire frame.

The area

The model covers the northwest quadrant of L'Enfant's planned city at its most characterful. The White House and its grounds anchor the southern edge of the frame — the President's House as L'Enfant designated it, positioned on axis with the broad diagonal of Pennsylvania Avenue. The rectangular street grid fills the frame above it, its streets running numerically west to east and alphabetically north to south, cut through by the diagonal avenues named after the original states of the Union. Dupont Circle and Logan Circle sit at the northern boundary, two of the ceremonial rond-points placed at the convergence of diagonal and orthogonal thoroughfares that give the L'Enfant plan its distinctive geometry. The area between them is some of the most handsome residential fabric in Washington — a dense mix of late 19th and early 20th century townhouses, embassy buildings and neighbourhood squares that shows L'Enfant's framework filled out over the course of a century of development.

Options and finish

• Frame: Oak frame, available in light or dark stain
• Acrylic case: Optional
• Display: Hanging system included — display vertically on a wall or horizontally on a desk or tabletop
• Scale: 1:5000

For more on how our cityscapes are made — the satellite data, the process, the thinking behind them — see our 3D cityscape art guide.