DC Metrocentric

H Street - Have you heard? The H Street Country Club is open… time to get your mini golf on! [Frozen Tropics] 

Bethesda - Montgomery County has unveiled a plan to create mixed-use homeless housing in a converted office building in Downtown Bethesda. This idea of providing housing at 30% of whatever homeless people earn has been extremely effective and successful in other areas. [TheThes] 

Columbia Heights - Can Columbia Heights be a bastion of New Urbanism? It’s moved pretty far in that direction already. [New Columbia Heights]

Clarendon - New cool looking retro Walgreens has sprung up in place of the old NTB shop along Wilson Blvd right across from Club Iota. [Clarendon Nights]

Everyone has an opinion on architecture, what’s yours?

By Spencer Lepler

Like many Americans, I decided to take a trip for Memorial Day; In my case, I drove to Atlanta, Georgia.  Like most people, I tend to be a “grass is greener” kind of guy, and usually spend most of my vacations dreaming about living in the city I am visiting.  Which is why my conclusions were so shocking to me. In spite of trying to see myself living in Atlanta, I kept finding reasons why I preferred DC.

As most people are aware, DC is a planned city.  The L’Enfant plan creates an ordered grid and overlaid on a spoke and hub system which imprints a sense of order and logic to the landscape. There area very few places where this is not true, for the most part the natural terrain is either overlaid with a grid or worked into the series of skewed avenues.  Much of this is owed to long term vision.

DC was planned to be a city of half a million people long before the first senator came to town.  This vision was not achieved until public health advances allowed for a year round occupation of the former swamp and until the New Deal brought a demand for more Federal workers in the early twentieth century. While only half a century younger, Atlanta seems to have no sense of planning or order to the street layouts.  Much of this is due to its start as a railroad town with no major geographic features to anchor its location.  In addition, while the destruction of the city during the civil war and extended rebuilding through the later half of the nineteenth century provided an organic identity, it was not until the mid twentieth century and the industrial Boom of World War II that Atlanta truly boomed

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It’s not often that a commercial building decides to change it’s address, but the office at 666 11th street has decided to do away with it’s devil designation. The Washington Examiner spoke with the property manager and they maintain that it was more than just superstition that caused them to change the address.

Apparently it’s just part of a normal rebranding that they are officially going with 1100 G Street NW, but we think it has something to do with the unsold floors. Interestingly there are no other office buildings in all of the District with the address “666″. [Photo (which is a different building): Peps]

We are not sure how helpful the sign is but it makes the perfect subject for this great shot. We love the color contrast in this photo of one of the many signs and fences around the Old Executive Office building near the White House.

[Photo: astrogrl]

Trinidad - Capital City Dinner has finally arrived in NE! The new restaurant made it down from New York fully intact. [Frozen Tropics]

Downtown - What can DC learn from London… a lot apparently. From zoning laws and density, to clean streets and green spaces. [14th & You]

Mt Vernon Triangle - Auto detailer on K Street does a little detailing of their own on their building, and it’s quite colorful. [The Triangle]

[Photo: inked78]

Examining the architecture of architects offices.

When the architecture firm OTJ needed to expanded and build new offices, they called on their own talent to design the space. They chose an old building on Eye Street that dates back to the early 1900’s, and converted it into a dynamic office space.

A central atrium (pictured) was preserved and surrounded by a variety of meeting spaces, both formal and informal, to promote collaboration and a sense of community for the organization. The first floor of the atrium provides a setting where staff and visiting congregate and are able to manipulate furniture, walls and drapery to create spaces for small meetings or full town hall gatherings.

Where architects choose to work says a lot about their style and aesthetic, and this cool space certainly looks like it would be a fun and functional place to work! What do you think?

More photos after the jump…

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Your weekly chance to take a stab at real estate appraisal.

This weeks PriceChecker must be well priced considering it’s about right in the middle of everyone’s guesses. The English style manor house is on the market for a nice $2,950,000.

Last month the District announced the bids they received for the redevelopment of several closed schools around the area, and the property that received the most proposals by far was the Hine School on Capitol Hill. One of the more intriguing proposals came from the Tiger Woods Foundation, but the WBJ is reporting that their bid for a learning center has been eliminated along with 3 other ideas.

Teams led by Western Development Group, Stanton Development Corp, the Bozzuto Group, Equity Residential, StreetSense Inc. and Quadrangle Development Corp are still in the running for Hine, a 131,300-square-foot Capitol Hill school. They will present their plans at a community meeting June 10.

[Photo: Ed Hoover]

Your weekly chance to take a stab at real estate appraisal. Submit your guesses in the comments and closest guess gets the PriceChecker crown for the week. This weeks PriceChecker is an English style manor house up in Northwest.

If you like rich wood covered walls this house is for you, there is mahogany in seemingly every room. There are only 3 bedrooms and 4 baths, but don’t be fooled, this house is huge with over 4,000 sqft of space.

So take your best guess and we will crown a winner next Tuesday afternoon, and should you need some more information to help you, follow the jump for the realtor spin, a little photo tour including lots of mahogany, and a “star studded” bathroom…

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As projects around the area are put on hold or scrapped all together, AU is still building! That big hole in the ground up on American University’s main campus will shortly be their new School of International Service.

Designed by Quinn | Evans Architects there are a bunch of sustainable features going into the project including vegetated roof terraces, on-site generation of renewable energy, and Cradle to Cradle material specifications. The 75,000 sqft will also include classrooms, offices, and a student lounge. If you’re like us, you love a good construction webcam, check out the progress if you’re interested.

Interior rendering, with bamboo, after the jump…

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If you have ever been down on the National Mall, chances are you have seen this strange gazebo structure located on the west side of the National History Museum. Curiously it is completely surrounded by a moat, as if to keep out intruders. Why it’s there and its significance to America is a mystery. The only thing we could dig up is that various towns across American claim to have donated it to the Smithsonian. Any ideas?
[Photo: gcolo]

The Arlington County Board has finally reached an agreement on what to do with the unfinished Bromptons at Cherrydale development. The project has sat empty and abandoned since 2006 from a stop work order and has been an eye sore to the neighborhood ever since.

As part of the agreement, the builder Ed Peete Co. is required to repair and finish the building within the next year or he will have to pay for its demolition. First up on the list of repairs is apparently going to be the deteriorated exterior over the next few months like putting in the sidewalks, curbs, and gutters and then on to the internal structural repairs. The finished building is expected to consist of condos and ground-floor retail. [Photo: Dayna Smith]

A bi-weekly take on the area from our friends at UrbanTurf.com 

The Difference Staging a Property Makes

We know that staging a property makes a difference in a buyer’s perception of it, but not until we looked at a condo on the market in Woodley Park did we realize just how much it mattered. Local stager Roslyn Ashford weighs in on the effects of staging this unit after the jump. 

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Everyone has an opinion on architecture, what’s yours?

By Spencer Lepler

I have lived in the DC Metro area for the past 4 years, and it wasn’t until this past sunday that I made my first trip to what I affectionally call “the forgotten quarter”, South West. I had worked in South East for a year and driven on South Capitol street before, but I never had a reason to head into the mostly residential and not very tourist focused southwest water district. I was pleasantly surprised when I went to pick a friend up from the Tiber Island Community on 4th and N Streets SW (pictured) and suddenly found myself transported out of the three DC’s I had known into a completely new and, although foreign, wonderful town.

For me, DC has always spanned three different cities. It is a city of brick townhouses where both the wealthy and poor live, sometimes on the same block, a city of glass and steel towers that would love to scrape the sky, but are hamstrung by the width of their avenues, and a city of concrete and stone neo-classical monuments and buildings always evoking the grandeur of our government. What I found on the other side of M street blew me away. This was a thoroughly “Modern” city, direct from the drawings of Le Corbusier, and unlike most other urban renewal projects of the 1960s which tore out low rise housing to put in tower blocks, this development seemed to be not only working, but thriving.

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The folks over at WeLoveDC have a great article up about the height limits in our fair city, which often (incorrectly) reference the Capitol Dome. However they bring up a great point that if no building could be taller than the dome, than we would have a bunch of 28 story buildings around town. The rule was actually refined so that “no building could be more than twenty feet taller than the width of the street” in most places.

And to think all this got started because of a single condo! [Photo: cityflickr]