Showing posts with label Robert Silman Associates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Silman Associates. Show all posts

Thursday, December 06, 2012

Latest Plans for St. Elizabeths Irk Preservationists

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Washington DC real estate development - St. Elizabeths
St. Elizabeth real estate development, Washington DC
Gateway Pavilion rendering. Image: DMPED site
An architecturally progressive cultural venue, Gateway Pavilion will bring new life to DC's Congress Heights neighborhood, its high-profile design team told DC's Historic Preservation Review Board (HPRB) Thursday.  The board received comments on the design for an "interim" arts and cultural venue planned for the heart of the 173-acre campus of psychological hospital St. Elizabeths Campus East.  It did not vote on the plans.

Plans for Gateway Pavilion call for a dramatic, wing-like roof and a five-module system that can be re-positioned to adapt the landscape of the venue, such as a for farmers' market or a concert stage, the design team told the HPRB.  The pavilion is being cast as a temporary, or "interim", anchor for a larger, planned 750,000 square foot build-out of the East Campus.

Commercial property service Washington DC
The Gateway Pavilion model at WDCEP Showcase
The Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development (DMPED) selected the design team of Davis Brody Bond, KADCON, and Robert Silman Associates in a bid to design and develop the venue on the city-owned land.  The high-profile firms are, individually, behind such sites as the National September 11th Memorial and the reconstruction of D.C.'s Eastern Market. 

St. Elizabeth's, perched on the fringe of Ward 8, sits on the brink of a major overhaul under a master plan by the General Services Administration (GSA), the property management arm of the federal government, that calls for 4.5 million s.f. of office space to one day house the Department of Homeland Security.

Construction on the West Campus is already underway, and the East Campus package is set for delivery in 2023.  The entire campus is expected to one day host about 14,000 employees.  The new headquarters for the U.S. Coast Guard could bring 4,000 workers to the neighborhood by August.

Commercial real estate plans and retail at St. Elizabeth, Washington DC
Gateway Pavilion. Image: DMPED site
"Our challenge is to continue to brand the campus as something that is not a mental institution," said Ethan Warsh of DMPED.  He said the design met the Department's goals of bringing food options and entertainment amenities to the neighborhood east of the Anacostia River, and to an increasing number of workers in the area.

The concept design has gone before the Commission on Fine Arts, the body charged with overseeing design changes to historical properties in the District, which recommended several changes including increasing walkability and sight lines across the property.  The proposed design calls for bike parking, rooftop rainwater collection, and self-composting toilets.

Acquiring land in southeast Washington DC, St. Elizabeths campus
Gateway Pavilion model at WDCEP Showcase
But the venue's seductive, green design isn't wooing everyone.  A member of the DC Preservation League (DCPL) argued the design obscured the historic buildings, and that the neighborhood needed basic retail more than it did entertainment venue and quick lunches.  

"This was also an area that we discussed should be the last possible space for development," said Rebecca Miller of DCPL. She said the neighborhood won't benefit from "fast, casual lunch places."  Backers said the site would be able to host eight to ten food trucks at any given time.

Instead, Miller said, neighborhood residents need places to buy basics, such as stockings.  "It cannot be all things to all people," Warsh, of DMPED, later commented.  "It can only be what $5 million will get us."

Note:  An earlier version of this article, in quoting the DC government's website, may have misleadingly implied that KADCON and Davis Brody Bond worked on the Eastern Market DC restoration.  That is incorrect.  Robert Silman Associates was the structural engineering firm on the project.
Campus plan - real estate development in Washington DC
GSA Master Plan for St. Elizabeth's Campus.



Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Mike and Kirk’s Excellent Adventure

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By Beth Herman
Decorated since 1966 for their work in areas of preservation and sustainability, and listing a few “memorable” feats like successful rescue efforts to shore up Frank Lloyd Wright’s legendary Fallingwater in Bear Run, Pa. in their fight book, NY-based structural engineers Robert Silman Associates know something about building. When the time came to expand and renovate the firm’s Georgetown offices, and with an open office culture tantamount to sustainable elements, the conversation quickly turned to aligning discourse with daylight, collaboration with carbon footprint.
“The new space is like a big studio, more representative of an architectural firm than an office for structural engineers,” said architect Michael Sewell, who, in nothing less than a philosophical pas de deux with his client, created an open space that trumpeted RSA’s past, present and future.

Occupying slightly more than a 6,000 s.f. floorplate on the top floor of a two-story industrial building–the former Knoll Furniture showroom–at 1053 31st Street NW for eight years, victims of what Sewell termed a “dental problem” where chopped offices characterized the space, RSA doubled its footprint in a 2010 lease renegotiation, seeking to consolidate its operation into “one cohesive whole,” said RSA Principal Kirk Mettam. Noting the D.C. office had grown from a force of one (himself) in a row house in 1998, to six people at the outset of the original Georgetown lease, to nearly 40 people today, Mettam called the current building’s location on the edge of a canal “one of its great, defining characteristics.”
With a north-facing wall and perimeter windows along the entire length, daylighting is a primary ingredient in a structural souffle that includes the calculated absence of elements like walls and ceilings. “Being structural engineers, we like the sort of tectonic idea of seeing structures and systems,” Mettam explained of the volume over his head. “It also provides a great opportunity for daylight to reflect upward,” he added, noting the addition of up/down lighting for short winter days. Removing two mason walls and replacing them with glass opened up the front space, which according to Mettam also provided an easy transition back into the workspace. “It lends itself very well to letting clients walk through without making them feel as though they’re onstage,” he affirmed.

As Long As There’s the Two of Us
Working together on past projects such as the renovation of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, before Sewell had whittled his own shingle, just prior to 2010 Mettam approached the architect with RSA’s laundry list–readily corroborated–which included ideas for open offices, more breakout spaces with a kitchen and library, exercise equipment, lockers and shower, and a bike rack. “We’re extremely bike-centric,” Mettam said of the office culture, speaking to the building’s prime, high transit location which inched it up in the LEED Silver certification process RSA is pursuing. Noting the firm’s mantra is “creating, renewing, preserving and sustaining,” Mettam said the new design clearly parallels all of this, crediting Sewell with supremely executing RSA’s vision, which the architect clearly shared.
“It’s infinitely preferable when you’re working with someone who speaks the language and understands what you’re doing,” Sewell said of the process, citing what he called “a steep education curve for people not used to the design or construction process.” Careful not to offend lay clients who make up the brunt of an architect’s practice, Sewell qualified his statement by quipping that now, “Kirk swipes all of my tricks.”

LEEDing the Way
Where LEED was concerned, Mettam revealed that RSA’s quest for sustainability is firmly rooted in the firm’s namesake’s–Robert Silman’s–indelible commitment to the same. The NY-officed Silman, for many years a green design leader of record in the general design community, as well as in the international engineering arena, underscored the firm’s search for the Georgetown space eight years ago with the mandate that “good, natural light and some degree of operable windows” be available, Mettam recalled. Accordingly, and even prior to the current renovation, RSA has kept partitions low, sacrificing privacy but embracing light, vistas and cooperation. Aligned in this regard and others with SRA’s NY headquarters, which occupies the top three floors of a Greenwich Village 12-story building, Mettam said RSA D.C. “debated ad nauseam” every conceivable green option, not only as each related to LEED, but to sustainability overall.

Saluting best practices as well as LEED, Sewell, who is also an adjunct professor of design at Catholic University’s School of Architecture and the University of Maryland, said all of the space’s finished materials are either high post-consumer content, high recycled content, rapidly renewable wood floors, low-emitting paints and high efficiency CFL light fixtures. “A lot of (RSA’s) clients, who are architects, are on the L - K Street corridor, a 10 to 15-minute walk from here, so staff can walk to their meetings from here,” he noted in a nod to pending LEED points.

Equal to the Task
In light of staff spirit and revealing what he called a “trial balloon,” or upcoming practice the office hopes to implement, Mettam’s “green ceilings” project is admittedly in a nascent stage but not without potential. Because of its ability to flourish in ambient and reflected natural light, RSA plans to purchase a number of Devil’s Ivy plants, something Mettam describes as a “fast growing and creeping” (one employee boasts she has one that is currently 30 feet long). Weaving the plant in and out of the open ceiling’s trusses, “we’re going to have a little race,” he said of his staff’s intrepidness, noting plants will start out over various desks, careening toward the outside wall. “We’re really excited about this,” Mettam quipped.

Of their collaboration in creating RSA’s D.C. design, Mettam said because his group had occupied the space for so long, they knew what to ask of it. “We knew all the answers before Michael showed up,” Mettam said wryly, “but he challenged us when we needed to be challenged, and we probably challenged him too. What resulted was something so well thought out that functions beautifully. The design represents the quality and aspirations of the firm.”


 

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