If you’ve been watching the FX network’s retro spy series, The Americans, which has its season finale tonight, you may or may not have noticed a recurring cameo by the National Geographic headquarters building as seen from the window of the show’s FBI headquarters (that’s us in the picture above, with our flat roof and long panels of glass).

Then again, perhaps you haven’t paid attention to this, focusing instead on the schemes and schisms complicating the lives of Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (played by Mathew Rhys and Keri Russell), a pair of deep-cover Cold War KGB agents in Ronald Reagan’s Washington D.C., who are trying their best to blend into the background.

But since I work in the building, I’ve been more than a little distracted when its image comes on screen. So I talked with the show’s production designer, John Mott, about our architectural cameo and how he went about recreating the early 80s feel for the critically acclaimed series. I also found out why the weather’s always so nice.

A Whole Lot of Trickery

Set design involves “a whole lot of trickery,” Mott says, which is especially appropriate for a show in which no one is quite what they seem.

The fake FBI office, for example, is set on a raised platform to make it seem to be several stories above the ground. Extending the backdrop well below the line of sight out the windows keeps the camera from accidentally revealing that the view is of a static, 80 foot by 16 foot backdrop. But even the backdrop itself is elaborately disguised.

The view, which Mott would only say “looks a lot like” the north façade of the National Geographic headquarters building, is a composite modern-day image created by a Los Angeles-based company that creates studio backdrops. For authenticity, it has been scrubbed of anachronistic clutter such as satellite dishes and cell phone transmission equipment. Since I recognize our neighboring buildings, I can also see that our headquarters and its surroundings have been reversed, creating a lovely geographic and visual pun for this show. West is east and east is west.

The backdrop is specially made so it can serve as both daytime and nighttime window dressing. The back is printed black to block out light, except for the windows, the Washington Monument, and other accents that let light from behind it shine through during the evening scenes. To further fool the viewer’s eye, the whole image is slightly out of focus to make the buildings appear more distant, and the skies are always clear. “If there’s any clouds you might get fixated on them because they don’t move,” Mott says, “so that’s why it’s always a nice, pleasant day.”

Getting the Feel Right

As geographers, my colleagues and I care about what gives a place its identity, so I asked Mott how he went about creating a sense of place for the show. As a period piece, there’s a lot of additional legwork involved. “It’s set in 1981 in D.C., but shot in 2013 in New York City, mostly in Brooklyn,” he points out. So what does it take to get things right, to make a modern place look old and make a fake place look real?

“It comes down a lot to feel,” Mott says. “What your gut tells you, based on experience and research. We do a lot of research.” Not just about the details of an era, but where things are headed to allow little hints about things that are starting to change, like color preferences. The end result is “something sort of made up but not completely wrong,” he says.

The actual FBI headquarters is about a mile and a half from where Mott placed it, and looks out along Pennsylvania Avenue with a view of the Capitol, not across M Street with a view of our building, but there are a lot of tall buildings with rows and rows of glass windows nearby as well, so it works.

Mott also wanted the sets to show the differences between the worlds of the Soviet spies and the American FBI agents.

“My visual concept is that the Russians inhabit the old world and the FBI inhabits the newer world. Interestingly, the FBI building is a Brutalist building, which people associate with the Soviets,” Mott says.

“I created an interior that was in keeping with the exterior. The feeling of a solid building that was futuristic at the time. I thought about what kind of furniture there would be. I wanted them to be leaning forward.”

Of course there is also plenty of action and intrigue happening at the KGB’s Washington headquarters, known as the residentura. “For the Russian set, I wanted to say that the Russians are trying to move forward but are stuck in the past. Lots of ornament, decoration, patterns. They love wallpaper, love baroque.”

Beyond the Studio

Many of the scenes are shot outside, which poses another set of challenges. For the Soviet residentura, the show uses an establishing shot of what was the Soviet Embassy in the 1980s but became the Russian ambassador’s residence in 1994.

For active shots, the crew has a lot of phone booths that they bring along. They also remove inappropriate signage and late model cars, and they replace them with things that have the right look. “It’s very tough to get all or even most of it period, so afterward we will go in digitally and remove things,” Mott says.

Luckily, the show “is mostly about the drama, about people’s relationships, and not about running down Constitution Avenue and firing at people. That plays to our strengths,” Mott added.

Despite all this planning and hard work, the goal of the set, as it is for any spook worth his or her salt, is not to get noticed. As Mott puts it, “If you don’t think about it too much, we’re probably doing our jobs.”

-Brad Scriber

To learn more about this unusual sport, Pop Omnivore’s Brad Scriber talked with photographer Matthieu Paley. He has been working in central Asia for 13 years and has photographed a number of buzkashi matches, including one for the February feature article “Stranded on the Roof of the World,” about life in Afghanistan’s northeastern panhandle, the Wakhan corridor.

1) The scrum and 2) the moment a chapandaz breaks away from the pack with the goat. Usually, they do so while holding their whip in their mouth, so as to free their hands. While at full spend, they often squeeze or hold the headless goat between one of their legs and the horse.

So if the mostly urban world isn’t going to be a uniform skyscraper forest, is it going to be a sprawling megasuburb with oceans of parking lots? Not necessarily. As Georgia Tech’s Ellen Dunham-Jones shows, there is a growing trend in the United States to retrofit suburbia in ways that incorporate what people like about more traditional urban settings (see video above). Abandoned supermarkets, shopping malls, and big box stores are being sliced and diced into walkable neighborhoods with street grids, mixed uses, and a comfortable feel. Rather than simply spreading out into fertile farmlands, these urban projects are targeting what Dunham-Jones calls “underperforming asphalt” – blank spaces within the urban boundary. As a result, the burbs are getting their own downtowns.

There are other ways that the classic image of suburban life is out of step with the reality. A panel featuring Dunham-Jones, Emil Frankel of the Bipartisan Policy Institute, Geoff Anderson of Smart Growth America, and Amy Fraenkel of the United Nations Environment Programme pointed out some surprising characteristics of the modern American suburb. While the suburbs are traditionally invoked as a place to raise your kids, about two-thirds of suburban households do not have children and that number is getting closer to three-quarters of households. Immigrants, who once looked to the urban core for homes are increasingly moving to suburbs instead. Risks to health and safety, such as higher rates of obesity and more car accidents, challenge the concept of suburbs as threat-free oases, and the increased costs of commuting by car offset some of the expected savings offered by cheaper housing at the urban edge. In short, the suburbs are looking less and less suburban.

One part of suburbia will probably be around for a while: cars and traffic. Even New Urbanism retrofits will likely only reduce the need for cars, not eliminate it. But how long will we be getting around in gas guzzlers? It depends who you ask. At a panel on the future of the automobile, also featuring Frankel, as well as Mary Beth Stanek of General Motors, Lonnie Johnson of Johnson Research and Development, and Niel Golightly of Royal Dutch Shell (see video), showed consensus that the benefits of mobility would keep us in private cars into the 22nd century. The panel discussed several ideas and initiatives aimed at changing the fuel used to move these cars, but most of the panelists thought they would be burning oil for a long time to come, partly due to technology limitations and partly due to consumer reluctance. Frankel noted that the transportation sector is the only part of our economy almost totally dependent on liquid petroleum, saying “the United States does not have an oil addiction, the American transportation system has an oil addiction.”

In sharp contrast later in the day, Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute thought a revolution was possible built on efficiency, lighter materials, and profit motive (see video). Lovins asserted that “by 2050 the US can get completely off oil coal and nuclear and a third off natural gas while growing the economy by 150%.” He also believes “this transition can be led by business for profit, enabled and accelerated by policy shifts that need not be at the congressional level, and can make society over five trillion dollars richer plus the value of whatever hidden costs like carbon emissions were avoided but weren’t counted.” Also among the optimists at Aspen was Daniel Nocera, who believes his low cost electrolyzer can eventually turn every home into a private power plant and gas station using only sunlight for energy and water for storage. Cars would run on hydrogen that was split off from the water. He hopes to have a prototype built in India by the end of 2011.

So, which vision of our transportation future as an urban species will prevail? Perhaps Johnson, who is working on advanced batteries to power electric cars, had it right when he said “you get what you work on. If you work on incremental improvements, if you work on short term solutions as a patchwork, then you end up with incremental solutions. If you work on game changing approaches then you’re going to end up with game changing results.”

Some key comments from the panelists:

Stewart Brand: Most of society is not geared to thinking in century terms. The political system, at least in a democracy, is not good at it. The economic system is not good at it.

Bill McKibben: It’s quite probable that later this year the Secretary of State will say it’s okay to build a pipeline from the tar sands in Alberta down to Texas. This is a 1,500 mile fuse on the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.

Thomas Lovejoy: We still tend to think in the very short term and locally when in fact we are disturbing global systems and the way that the planet actually works.  We need to consciously manage the planet.

Marcia McNutt: Oil wells blow out all the time and it’s simply because the industry hasn’t put the effort into making them safe. And no one has made them put the effort into making them safe. They could do it if they wanted to.

Stewart Brand: The internet is probably more brittle than all of us thought. …The only communication in the United States that is guaranteed if the internet goes down is between the President of the United States and the missile silos. Everything else is up for grabs.

Bill McKibben: We need to figure out how to adapt to that which we cannot prevent….But we even more desperately need to figure out how to prevent that to which we cannot adapt, and the key to that is stanching the flow of carbon into the atmosphere right now, which is above all a political project and a tough one.

You can follow the action at the Aspen Environment Forum live on Twitter by visiting http://twitter.com/@natgeogreen.