Category

Mixed-Use Development

Crosstown Concourse Wins Driehaus Foundation National Preservation Award

On October 17, 2018

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has announced that Crosstown Concourse, a mixed-use redevelopment of a former Sears Roebuck distribution center, won a 2018 Driehaus Foundation National Preservation Award. This award comes the same week that the building’s original occupant, Sears, filed for bankruptcy.

It’s been a tumultuous ride for Sears, with the closure of distribution centers decades ago portending the former titan of retail’s eventual collapse. With the rise of online retailers has come the steady decline of brick-and-mortar shops, even the big box stores that once anchored suburban shopping centers. Where new business models rely more on carrier infrastructure and customer reviews than on physical showrooms, legacy businesses have struggled to keep pace and maintain relevance. If there’s a silver lining to the emptying out of all of this retail square footage, it’s in projects such as Crosstown Concourse, which successfully repurposes a 1.3 million-square-foot structure, transforming it into a one-stop-neighborhood filled with young disruptors of the type much more likely to purchase with one click than mail-order anything. As I wrote for Architectural Record back in February, the Crosstown Concourse redevelopment offers a potential template for oversized buildings that have remained standing long after the businesses that occupied them evaporated:

“As cities grapple with the respective futures of their industrial pasts, they would do well to look at Crosstown Concourse. For this development, the vision was strong and swayed a diverse group of prospective tenants to get on board. From an environmental standpoint, the transformation of the Sears building into a successful venture like Crosstown Concourse turned a white elephant into green one.”

The Driehaus Foundation National Preservation Award jury included Mtamanika Youngblood, an Atlanta preservationist, Jeffrey Cody, a Getty Conservation Institute historian, and architecture critic Paul Goldberger.

880 P Street in ArchitectureDC Summer Issue

On July 6, 2018

by Deane

880 P Street

I was pleased to contribute two articles to ArchitectureDC Magazine’s annual residential design issue (Summer 2018), looking at housing from both the single-family and multifamily perspectives. On the single-family front, it was David Jameson’s Hull House in Alexandria, which is a contemporary take on the gabled-roof silhouette so prevalent in that neighborhood. The multifamily project was 880 P Street by Shalom Baranes, the last piece of a multi-block development puzzle in the heart of Shaw centered around the historic market at O Street. An excerpt from the article follows.

Lobby

Fifty years ago this spring, as the nation recoiled from the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., its capital descended into four days of that left whole swaths of Washington in smoking rubble. A quarter century later, the Victorian-styled O Street Market—which had served continuously as the Shaw neighborhood’s public marketplace since its 1881 completion, but was slow to re-emerge from that post-riot rubble—was again the site of turmoil as gun violence erupted, injuring eight people and killing one, 15-year-old Duwan A’Vant.

In the two decades that followed the 1994 shooting, O Street Market fell into disrepair. A grocery chain, Giant, opened and paved over the rest of the two blocks bounded by O Street, NW, to the south, P Street to the north, and 7th and 9th streets to the east and west, respectively. Now, thanks to a forward-thinking re-investment initiated by Roadside Development in 2001, the O Street Market is restored, and the two blocks are filled with a hotel, various restaurants, and new mid-rise residential buildings that bring density and housing into a historic district that needs both. The last piece of that puzzle, designed by Shalom Baranes Associates (SBA), is 880 P Street.

“I think the building is an example of how you can do contemporary design in historic neighborhoods, and it’s going to be OK,” said Robert Sponseller, AIA, who is a design principal at SBA, and who led the master plan. “You can put modern and old together, and there’s a synergy you get when you do that that’s more powerful than just recreating the old.”

Read the full story at ArchitectureDC.

Southward view from the 880 P Street rooftop

Rooftop amenities include a swimming pool, a grilling deck, an outdoor shower, and this lounge with shuffleboard table

The 880 P Street project occupies the L-shaped northwest corner of the site, and completes the second phase of the overall City Market at O master plan, which was also designed by SBA. The site development restores the 8th Street right-of-way that had been eliminated in the mid-1970s, realigning it with the L’Enfant Plan, and resurrects the O Street Market with the insertion of the Giant within its shell (the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1995).

Phase one of the project also included the Hodge—an apartment tower of 90 affordable units aimed at seniors, to fulfill requirements of Washington’s inclusionary zoning laws—as well as two, 10-story market-rate condominium towers and the 182-room Cambria Hotel at the southwest corner of the site. While residents of the Hodge must meet income thresholds—18 units are set aside for people who earn less than 50 percent of area median income (AMI), with the other 72 for those at or below 60 percent AMI—the other three market-rate towers, including 880 P Street, have no such restrictions.

The 880 P Street building and its two sibling apartment complexes aim squarely at a higher-income demographic, with one-bedroom units starting upwards of $2,400 per month (rents at the Hodge, by contrast, are $964 to $1,169). Billed as luxury living, the units themselves are compact, but outfitted with finishes such as Italian cabinetry and Corian countertops. Floor-to-ceiling windows and private balconies afford broad views outward and daylight penetration within. In two-bedroom units, Raydoor fixed and sliding partitions take advantage of the abundance of daylight to cast a diffuse glow in the secondary bedroom.

Read the full story at ArchitectureDC.

The Watergate in Black and White

On April 27, 2018

by Deane

The Watergate Complex at dusk | © Deane Madsen

It was my great honor to photograph The Watergate in grainy detail for a photo essay to accompany a long-form piece by Rachel Kurzius for Curbed entitled “Watergate is a place, too.” For this assignment, I carried both my 35mm Nikkormat camera and my digital Nikon D5000—just to be safe—but the images on film turned out just fine, despite weather complications in the form of scattered thunderstorms and winds gusting above 40 knots off the Potomac.

Garden enclosed by the Watergate | © Deane Madsen

After parking beneath the Watergate, where the waffle slab ceiling is glorious but dimly illuminated, I walked all around the Watergate’s grounds, looking for signs of life, interesting details, and unexpected angles. The Watergate Hotel offers supreme views into the ground-level courtyard with the Washington Monument just one of many landmarks visible in the city’s backdrop. The roof terrace of the Kennedy Center, which neighbors the Watergate complex to the south, likewise afforded decent views back toward the complex, though it was here that the weather was at its most severe.

View of the Watergate complex across the Potomac River from Roosevelt Island | © Deane Madsen

In between thunderstorms, I drove out to Roosevelt Island, and walked around its northeastern shoreline looking for a vantage point from which to shoot the Watergate over the Potomac. Low tree branches obscured most direct views, but I continued until I found a relatively unobstructed view back.

A lone pedestrian walks the lower level of the Watergate | © Deane Madsen

Perhaps because of the inclement weather, there were few people out and about during my shooting days (I did return the next day for a chance at clearer skies), but the effect is one of eerie tranquility. I owe a debt to many architectural photographers that have preceded me, notably Ezra Stoller and Simon Phipps, both of whom have made photographs that emphasize form, materiality, and play of light.

The Watergate’s distinctive toothlike balcony stalagmites provide add rhythm to the buildings’ rounded forms | © Deane Madsen

Read the fascinating full story at Curbed.

Former Memphis Distribution Center Gets Platinum Makeover

On February 25, 2018

by Deane

Crosstown Concourse in Architectural Record’s March 2018 issue

Declines in U.S. manufacturing and industry have led to a reverse hermit-crab effect, wherein companies are leaving behind empty shells of buildings that are too large for other companies to inhabit comfortably. But within these husks lies an amount of embodied energy so great that the environmental impact—not to mention financial cost—of demolishing them is also too big to bear. While adaptive reuse of industrial facilities is hardly new behavior, the scale and environmental consciousness of a recent redevelopment in Memphis called Crosstown Concourse serves as a demonstration of how cities can turn empty warehouses into communities of symbiotic entities beneath a single roof. Below is an excerpt from an article that appeared in the March 2018 issue of Architectural Record.

In 1993, when retailer Sears, Roebuck closed its mail-order catalogue business, it also shuttered distribution plants around the country, including one in Memphis that just sat abandoned. A quarter of a century later, the 1.3 million-square-foot facility has been transformed into the Crosstown Concourse, an innovative mixed-use property designed by the local firm Looney Ricks Kiss (LRK) in collaboration with the Vancouver office of DIALOG.

The project, completed last year, was the brainchild of artist Christopher Miner and University of Memphis art history professor Todd Richardson. Crosstown Concourse is home to a health center, arts and education groups, a high school, and 265 apartments.

When LRK principals Tony Pellicciotti and Frank Ricks first visited the site, the building was in serious disrepair. Since the closure of the distribution center, no money had been spent on upkeep, but the 1920s building itself was in solid shape. Its all-concrete frame had been designed to support live loads of 250 to 300 pounds per square foot. A 1960s steel-column-supported addition suffered though, in large part due to thieves who undermined the structure in search of copper flashing. Because of its significant mass, the center was too expensive to demolish, but the right redevelopment formula proved elusive until Richardson and Miner stepped up to form Crosstown Arts.

Read the full article at Architectural Record.

Sliced Porosity Block–CapitaLand Raffles City

On December 19, 2013

by Architect Magazine: Articles by Deane Madsen, Assoc. AIA

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