"Eavesdropping on the design icons who made Washington’s Metro"

Alexandra Lange highlights the history of DC's Metro as context for understanding the current challenges facing both it and NYC's subway system in her piece, "Eavesdropping on the design icons who made Washington’s Metro".

...We have to see transit design as Weese did: distributed across the city, both as a network of connected stations, platforms, and trains, and as a network of connected tasks. Weese and his team identified the problem, but needed the sometimes harsh design critiques of the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA), “the only federal commission dedicated to design review and aesthetic excellence,” as it says on its website, to create a solution that spoke to place, operations and maintenance.