Covert Capital by Andrew Friedman

Author:Andrew Friedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520274648
Publisher: University of California Press

FIVE

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Iran-Contra as Built Space

U.S. IMPERIAL TEHRAN IN EXILE AND EDGE CITY’S CENTRAL AMERICAN PRESENCE

GROWING UP IN EDGE CITY1

In 1987, observers noticed a new skyline in the suburbs of the covert capital. The seventeen-story Tycon Towers I, designed by the architects John Burgee and Philip Johnson and the whimsical developer James T. Lewis, surged over the trees. At the height of his fame as the inventor of the postmodern skyscraper and designer of the corporate towers that visually marked the Reagan years, Johnson chose Tycon Towers as a new challenge, his only skyscraper in the 1980s built in the suburbs. Its gargantuan, faux classical detailing, its superscale freestanding columns done in Virginia brick and said to be the world’s tallest, its arches resembling the handles on a shopping bag—all of these features defined the tower placed on what the architects called a green “front yard.” It seemed to herald the end of dense, modernist urbanism. Around it, an entire city seemed to molt. Modular office buildings and skyscrapers marched over lawns and parking lots, ever swelling in size. They orbited around a mall called Tysons Corner, built two decades before.

To observers, the buildings announced an era: “strange, sprawling, towering shapes” had landed in the low-lying suburbs, defined by their repetitious bands of opaque glass. But unlike the style of building elsewhere, Tysons Corner still looked green amid the remnants of Virginia’s countryside. Dark glass window rows reflected the green hills and curving cloverleaves, imbuing all with a slightly futuristic quality. Northern Virginia journalist Joel Garreau, who passed these places commuting to his job at the Washington Post, gave them a name: Edge City. Thanks in no small part to his work, Tysons Corner’s slightly futuristic quality grew into a boom industry in nineties urban studies. Garreau defined Edge City by its mass: “high-rised, semi-autonomous, job-laden, road-clogged communities of enormous size, springing up on the edges.” It was a conceptual product of the covert capital. But it soon came to stand for everything about America except its empire: its love of individualism and free enterprise, its love of opportunity and choice, its love of privacy and security, its love of nature and technology in a “constantly reinvented land.” The fact that Edge City sounded an epitaph for the capital at DC had nothing to do with politics for Garreau. Northern Virginia was simply where it was at.2

The same year, a second phenomenon also rocked the Dulles Corridor: the Iran-Contra Affair. Next to Edge City’s heady visibility, Iran-Contra was the epitome of murk. A convoluted network of federal officials, contractor CEOs, and quasi-official shadow agencies had, in violation of two federal orders, sold arms to Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary Iran, supposedly the sworn enemy of the people who had done the selling.3 Profits from those weapons sales had gone to the contras, the bands of corporate executives and rightists the CIA had helped form to overthrow the new Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Intentional complexity was Iran-Contra’s very structure. But by summer 1987, the scandal was also a seemingly clear and quite spectacular TV show.

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