There’s a rash of apartment buildings being built in Washington for the rich that are shaped like middle fingers. Can Washington, D.C. get any more pompously absurd?
One such building has been dubbed “The Monster” and it’s located on V. St. NW. The asking price for the middle unit: $749,000. And by the way, though it’s a dozen blocks away, the building faces the White House.
“These skyward-extending residences are spreading across the city, fueled by small developers eager to cash in on the District’s real estate boom and seize any inch of available real estate, which these days means vertical empty space,” wrote WaPo‘s Ian Shapira on Sunday in a story that was also featured in Express today.
The building genre is known as pop-ups. A WaPo headline in August of last year read, “Considering the unusual home” to describe it. Unusual, to say the least. And to many, an eyesore. At the time, reporter Petula Devorak wrote, “Yes, it’s ugly. No question about it.”
When it first popped up (pun intended) the DCist blog had to make sure it was real. “We simply had to stop by to make sure that it wasn’t some visual photography trick that made the house seem more ridiculous than it really is,” the author wrote. “It’s not. It really looks like this.”
Planetizen, an LA-based urban planning site, has also written about D.C.’s middle finger architectural phenomenon, asking simply, “Would You Live in D.C.’s ‘Middle Finger’ Monstrosity?”
David Jamison, a D.C. architect, described the building like this to Washington City Paper for a Valentine’s Day story earlier this year: “…‘I’m going to go six stories in the air and tell you to go fuck yourself.’”
(Photo credit: Popville. See here.)