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mixed-use residential buildings have recently been completed.
The most prominent of these is arguably the Highline, located
at the southwest corner of the emerging neighborhood, which
is nearest to the intersection of the two major avenues and the
nearby New York Avenue Metro Station, making it a major
gateway to the entire Union Market precinct.
Designed by Eric Colbert & Associates, PC (ECA), the
300-unit Highline stands out not only by virtue of its strategic
location, but also because of its eye-catching design: an
assemblage of projecting and recessed glassy volumes perched
atop a two-story brick-and-glass base. The design of the base,
which contains leasable retail space, alludes to the area’s historic
low-rise market buildings. The composition of the upper stories
was inspired by the stacked shipping containers that are often
piled up along the adjacent railroad tracks. Some architects
have been designing buildings using actual recycled shipping
containers for many years now, but the limited range of shapes
and sizes of those containers imposes significant compositional
and functional constraints. Here, while the source of inspiration
is easy to grasp, the actual design is more intricate than would
have been possible with actual containers. The proportions
of the assembled volumes and the depths of their projections
and recesses were derived through repeated digital modeling,
allowing refinements to the composition while optimizing
interior layouts.
In developer-driven projects such as this, architects usually
feel great pressure to fill out every possible cubic foot of space
permitted under zoning and other regulations. That’s one of
the main reasons that so many recent DC buildings tend to be
disappointingly boxy. One common zoning constraint, which
varies from site to site, is the cap on allowable Floor Area Ratio
(FAR), referring to the ratio of a building’s total floor area to the
square footage of its site. For the Highline, lead designer
JB Lallement exploited a section of the code that allows limited
exceptions to the prescribed building perimeter. “We were
able to compensate for the loss of FAR of every inset by offset
bay projections beyond the property line, which do not count
toward FAR,” explained Lallement, citing a technique that has
become more common in recent DC developments. Having
thus literally broken the box, “We intentionally kept the façade
design simple, in order not to compete with, but to complement
the strong massing articulation,” he said. “Facing southwest,
we relied on strong shadows to emphasize the ‘ins and outs’
of the façades.”
Those ins and outs could have wreaked havoc with the
interior layout, since most multi-family residential developers
prefer to keep variations in the individual unit plans to a
minimum in order to reduce construction costs. “The Highline’s
unit layouts are fairly typical,” explained Lallement, “however,
the wide range of unit types is what differentiates it from other
typical DC apartment buildings. Our client wanted it this way,
and the building’s irregular massing helped us achieve that.”
While most new residential buildings in DC with more than
nine units are required to include a percentage of affordable
units, the Highline went through the DC government’s Planned
Unit Development process, which allows for a larger building
than what is permitted by right on a specific site in exchange
for certain concessions. One such concession is the provision
of a larger percentage of affordable units, including some at
Residents’ amenity spaces.
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