The design of Washington, D.C. was created by Pierre Charles L'Enfant, a French-born American engineer, architect, and urban planner. In 1791, President George Washington appointed L'Enfant to develop the plan for the new federal city on the Potomac River, which would become the capital of the United States. L'Enfant's design featured a grand, baroque-style layout with wide avenues, public squares, and inspiring buildings, including a central "public walk" that is now the National Mall. His plan laid out the city in a grid intersected by diagonal avenues, inspired by European urban design and neoclassical elements to emphasize the democratic ideals of the young nation

. Despite challenges and eventual dismissal from the project, L'Enfant's ambitious geometrical plan endured and remains the foundational design of Washington, D.C. His work influenced the planning of other major cities worldwide and in the U.S.