A Hate-Love Relationship With the Massey Building

Last year my mother-in-law moved in with us for what was to be an indefinite length of time. When she was here I fretted about the lack of privacy we were used to and all of her poor habits like leaving the refrigerator door open while she made herself a sandwich or leaving the TV for hours when she wasn’t even in the room.

After about eight months she finally told us her work was done in Northern Virginia and she would leaving. I suddenly realized that I would miss all the help she provided with the kids and the insightful conversations we had in the evenings after everyone else went to bed.

It was a classic case of not appreciating what you have until its gone.

This brings me to the Massey Building, the modern monolith that has dominated downtown Fairfax since 1967. The county plans to build a new building to house the public safety offices and demolish it sometime around 2015.

For years I have complained of the Massey Building’s brutal modernist architecture and scale that disrespects that of our historic downtown just a few hundred feet away. It is an unfortunate and cold icon of the city perched near the top of a hill making it visible from miles away. It is reflective of a dark time in architecture and urban planning notorious for disrupting the urban fabric with massive swaths of paving and fortress-like buildings that turn their backs to the street.

But, when I realized it soon will no longer be there, I began to see the lighter side of it. For one, the modernist style can be a welcome break from the consistent traditional architecture of the historic downtown, especially as newer regulations ensure that such architecture will be the dominant form for the foreseeable future. Having a variety of architectural styles that represent different periods gives the downtown some character, even if some of the if some individual buildings are less desirable.

Also, being in the middle of the courts complex, the Massey Building didn’t disrupt the urban fabric as many buildings of the time did. The southwest waterfront in DC and downtown Rockville for example, are two local areas often criticized because hundreds of homes and businesses along with the existing street networks were destroyed to make way for urban renewal projects full of buildings reminiscent of the Massey Building. This puts it in a category of architecture people often associate with one of the worst planning blunders in recent history.

So despite my initial reaction to the news that the building will soon vanish from our skyline I have come to realize that I will actually miss it. What's worse is not knowing what will go in its place. The county will certainly want to make use of the space that the building sits on and we can only hope that it won’t simply be replaced by an even uglier building, or even worse, an extension of the county jail.