30

TUESDAY

If you’ve seen one underground Metro station, you’ve practically seen them all. And it doesn’t take long before those soaring coffered vaults slip into the background of your daily zip to work and you forget how starkly beautiful they are—timeless and sort of primitive in their modernist way. Architect Harry Weese came up with some ingenious solutions in the many Metro stations he designed for the National Capital Transportation Agency, which hired him in 1966, but none are as memorable as those gray waffles arching over the platforms. The road to getting them built, however, was not quite so graceful. Tonight, Zachary Schrag, a doctoral candidate in history at Columbia University, will enumerate the many trips Weese took back to the drawing board during his stormy betrothal to the city’s Commission of Fine Arts, which approved his final designs. The Latrobe Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians hosts Schrag’s lecture, “How Metro Got Its Vaults: Federal Modernism, Harry Weese, and Rapid Transit in Washington, D.C.,” at 7 p.m. at the American Institute of Architects’ Second Floor Board Room, 1735 New York Ave. NW. $8. (202) 332-2446. (Bradford McKee)