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Gaylord Hotel

The Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Prince George's County, a new addition to the Gaylord Hotels chain in D.C., boasts an 18-story glass atrium, multi-level indoor gardens, and a rooftop lounge.

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"Just the construction outside," the buddy replies.

The view is always being touted at the Gaylord. The best tables in both of the higher-priced restaurants -- Moon Bay and the Old Hickory Steakhouse -- look out at the harbor docks and the river and the bridge and Old Town Alexandria. Choice suites look out to the view. The couple's treatment rooms at the Relache spa face out onto the view. At Pose "ultralounge," the men's urinals look out over the entire, imagined city. The view, the view, the view. (The view is the Wilson Bridge, about which the most attractive thing is that it is nearly finished.)

Our room is wallcovered in creamy, faux leather. The decor is updated nautical, and there are grainy, sepia-toned prints of Chesapeakeana ("Bloody Point Bar Lighthouse, Maryland, Photographed by Maj. Jared A. Smith, July 3, 1885" . . . ). The aesthetic mood in most of the hotel is a familiar reiteration of tall ships, colonists, nation, Betsy Ross, seafood, flat screens, WiFi. In the 1960s, Washington hotels stopped looking like the Mayflower and started looking like the United Nations building. Then in the '80s, they looked like the first "Star Wars" movie or "Logan's Run," with chrome and concrete passageways and discotheques. The Gaylord evokes, in a way, the last "Star Wars" movie, a CGI galaxy gone faux fancy with red carpeting and marble; fleurs-de-lis and Jedi temples.

Everything in the Gaylord seems to have the purpose of referencing something else, the hallowed Epcot principle of being derivative: "Think of the Bellagio," Gorrell said, about the dancing fountains in the atrium, on a tour of the hotel a couple of weeks before it opened. "They were designed by the same team."

In the atrium, the Gaylord built two full-scale houses, the red-brick one being, Gorrell said, "A re-creation of a Colonial-era mercantile shop. This architecture is representative of Old Town Alexandria." Inside it, the Gaylord sells merchandise straight from Colonial Williamsburg (ready-to-mix spoon bread, Byers' Carolers dolls in revolutionary outfits). The other house sells monogrammed pajamas, delivered to your room before turndown, Gorrell said, and is inspired by a yellow, 18th-century clapboard farmhouse in Georgetown.

The Relache spa one level above the atrium garden eschews the same-old earth-toney Sedona feel, and is decorated in all black-and-white tiles, "like Chanel," Gorrell said. The Old Hickory Steakhouse, with seating for 200 patrons, is supposed to be "like a Georgetown rowhouse" and features its own maitre de fromage, who will custom-select and teach you about your cheese plate, "just like in Europe." The Pienza buffet restaurant specializes in being "like an open-air market," preparing fresh pastas and antipasti and desserts; the Moon Bay restaurant throws fresh fish, Chef Duane Keller says, "like in Seattle," using crushed-ice-filled fish bins, onto which green flecks of verdigris on copper have been meticulously painted, to look real.

Having been to Vegas, Seattle, Chanel, Georgetown and Williamsburg in one hour, it is time to take the elite, express elevator up and up to the Gaylord's rumination on "New York," at the Pose ultralounge. ($20 cover charge; reserved tables and booths require a $500 minimum liquor and small-bites tab.) The club's manager, Anthony Rakis, brags on a publicity tour that no other bar, even in New York, has the elaborate infused-vodka delivery system that Pose has, with a network of pipes running under the floor, serving it up at seven bucks a shot. Nothing was spared: the sound system, the projection system, the chrome, the clear stairwells and dance-pod balconies. The two-story plate-glass windows and wraparound balcony look back toward teeny, tiny Washington -- monument, dome, small enough to fit into a snow globe of Washington. "This is where everyone is going to want to be on Fourth of July," Rakis says.

Who named it Pose?

"That was . . . picked long ago by someone in corporate," says Rakis. "What it means is, everyone has their 'pose.' As in, what's your pose? Is it someone who wants to hang out with his friends and kick back, or is it some of the aficionados or fashionistas who come through? So we like that -- 'pose' -- we're going to work with that idea, that everyone has their pose."

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Out on the dock, later, getting some actual air. The hotel looms behind us. Here is where water taxis will shuffle conventioneers to Georgetown or Old Town or Mount Vernon several times a day, $7 each way.

Giant birds are making late-afternoon circles over the Potomac, while outgoing flights from Reagan rumble away, high above. Are the birds hawks? Bald eagles? To ask is to half suspect that the Gaylord had them brought in, special.

Turn around, look at National Harbor and the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center. Consider it one day, decades or centuries from now, as a fabulous ruin, a tell-all biography of who we were, People of the Atrium. Consider it done.