L'Enfant Plaza (plaza and promenade)

L'Enfant Plaza grew out of the Zeckendorf-Pei plan for rebuilding Washington's Southwest quadrant. Pei, then head of the architectural team at Webb & Knapp, developer William Zeckendorf's firm, drew up in 1956, with Harry Weese's help, an ideal plan for the area that already featured L'Enfant Plaza, a reimagined waterfront and a town centre mixing housing and shops. The plan shifted over the years: some parts were never built, others were greatly altered.

Pei drew the master plan of L'Enfant Plaza in 1965. Araldo Cossutta, a partner in his firm, designed the Astral and Comsat office buildings there, put up in 1967-1968. From 2011 to 2015 SmithGroupJJR gutted and remade the underground shopping mall for its owner, JBG Companies, adding a glass pavilion under a large skylight, designed to sit well with Pei's architecture.

Pei planned the complex as a set of buildings held apart from the surrounding districts so as to open up a large plaza. Beneath it a three-level sunken mall brings together shops, an auditorium and parking.

The Tenth Street Mall, a wide pedestrian way running from the Smithsonian on the National Mall towards the waterfront, passes through L'Enfant Plaza. It ends at the Tenth Street Overlook, now Banneker Park, built in 1967: a plain ellipse 200 feet (61 m) across, designed by Dan Kiley and his office with I. M. Pei, which looks out over the Potomac. At its centre a large conical fountain throws water more than nine metres into the air.

A place of offices, shops and passage.

The plaza can be reached on foot along the Tenth Street Mall, which starts from the National Mall; the neighbouring L'Enfant Plaza Metro station connects with the underground mall.