The National Mall: A Hierarchy of Needs

In anticipation of the United States’ Sestercentennial, the National Park Service has commissioned Land Collective and GWWO Architects to conceptualize comfort stations throughout the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The design team’s vision is to confirm locations for use as elaborated in the National Mall Plan, but add value to the potential experience by describing consistently distributed pavilion stations that offer restrooms, food, and wayfinding among other assets, to assist visitors to the nation’s landscape narrative the opportunity for elevated thinking beyond that required for corporal satisfaction. In doing so, it increases the potential for visitors to explore, uninhibited, democratic principles and self-actualization. Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs describes, conceptually, the potential opportunities when “need” gives way to enlightenment.