When I was in Junior High School, I wanted to be an architect. I even took a drafting class, and in my spare time designed a city. Never got around to designing actual buildings before my interests turned to physics, then photography, and finally computers.

I still find good architecture to be amazingly inspiring. There’s something about architecture that makes it special: it’s like a monument or a sculpture, but it’s also a space that is itself planted in a space and has a flow. I’ve tweeted about interesting buildings a few times and highly recommend Wired Magazine’s Building-of-the-week page.

Here’s a local building that does three things at once: 1) it has an interesting and attractive design, 2) it has several parts that join the building with a couple of different surrounding architectures, and 3) it includes a replica of the previous building as an element in its design. So it spans both space and time. Very classic.

Note  the transition from glass facade to square cement on the left, as it scales down in size to match the adjacent 3-story building. Especially note the blue diamonds and the uniquely-shaped windows beneath. This is a replica of the iconic car dealer’s showroom that was on that corner for decades before being torn down.

The Washington Post has a nice article giving you more detail and history, and features the photo above.