Charlottesville’s Center of Developing Entrepreneurs (CODE) in Architectural Record
It is always a thrill to do a site visit to a see a new project, and this one was a delightful opportunity to revisit Charlottesville, a place to which I should go more often. Here’s the new Center of Developing Entrepreneurs—which integrates a stepped building into a challenging, sloping site—which appeared in Architectural Record‘s May issue.
An excerpt from Architectural Record:
Charlottesville’s Center of Developing Entrepreneurs (CODE) is a beguiling chameleon, created to foster the growth of new local businesses while also engaging its community. Designed by the local firm WOLF ACKERMAN and the New Orleans–based EskewDumezRipple (EDR), which has a second office in Washington, D.C., the project was conceived by CSH Development to encourage nearby University of Virginia graduates to remain in the city. The goal: to transform it into a business hub that could compete with the likes of Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas. “The whole idea of the building was, utilizing the concept of a coworking space as an entry point for young people,” says EDR principal José Alvarez. This vision—to attract and nurture talent within a building—he says, inspired a form that steps from level to level to symbolize how one can move up and “grow” a business.
Built on an incline, the structure changes scale at every elevation: On Main Street, the city’s historic pedestrian mall, it is a three-story building, in keeping with the small shops lining this promenade. On Water Street, at its southern edge, the building rises nine stories from the ground to its apex. And, from the top of Vinegar Hill, looking back toward the mall, it takes on another perspective with a four-story band of brick rainscreen, with staggered windows above a ground-level plinth, which grows from single- to double-height as the building moves downhill across an 18-foot change in elevation. It also masks the point where the building steps up, adding another three levels clad in clay-colored metal above the four-story brick band on its Water Street frontage.
Read the full story at Architectural Record: https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/16223-eskewdumezripple-and-wolf-ackermans-center-of-developing-entrepreneurs-steps-up-to-history