Washington has a long maritime history, said Stanton Eckstut, a principal at the architecture firm EE&K, which is now a part of Perkins Eastman Architects and the Wharf’s master planner. The city’s original design was based on “maritime arrival,” he said, but that way of life has been lost, and he described the Wharf as a 21st-century model to bring people back to the river’s edge.

The project — comprising 24 acres on land and 50 on the water — draws its inspiration, Mr. Eckstut said, from waterfront developments in Baltimore, San Francisco and Seattle, as well as from cities abroad like Sydney, Australia, and Qingdao, China. Amer Hammour, chairman of Madison Marquette, said European waterfronts like the ones he had visited in Stockholm and Copenhagen also impressed the planners because they took people right to the water’s edge.

The project in Washington, which is being completed on time and on budget, features a mile-long cobblestone promenade, four new public piers, two office buildings and three hotels. Two condominium and two apartment buildings will provide a total of 861 residential units, with some set aside for low- and moderate-income tenants. The upper floors offer views of the river and the Pentagon, the Washington Monument, the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials, and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Despite a 130-foot height limit for new development in Washington, Mr. Eckstut said, “we were able to carve out a real city fabric and one purposely not like the federal city fabric, but really to go back to a more walkable compact city without much order, great variety, no symmetry, nothing predictable, if we could avoid it.”