Page 60 - Fall 2019

Chapter Design Award in Architecture

Signature at
Reston Town Center
Reston, VA
Shalom Baranes Associates

Interior Design Consultants: Hartman Design Group
Landscape Architects: LSG Landscape Architects
Structural Engineers: Thornton Tomasetti
MEP Engineers: WSP
General Contractor: HITT Contracting

The Signature at Reston Town Center, also designed by
Shalom Baranes Associates, is located at the corner of
Reston and New Dominion parkways in northern Virginia.
The site “is the last major piece of a decades-long master
plan and build-out that completes the vision of [developer]
Robert Simon for an interconnected network of urban
villages in Reston,” the firm said. “While much of the
architecture in the central town center has post-modern
and neo-traditional trappings, the design team for the
Signature site found inspiration in the nearby satellite
village of Lake Anne, a 1960s-era community also
envisioned by Simon that embodies a brutalist modern
language.” The Signature project’s design “combines
the best aspects of Reston’s ’60s modernism and ’90s
New Urbanism.”
The project, with about 1.28 million square feet of
space and 508 living units, consists of two wings, each
capped by a slender residential tower, with the west
wing forming part of a mixed-use parcel facing the town
center. A large-format grocery store anchors the site’s
southwest corner. Near the street, the above-grade part
of the building’s multi-level parking facility is screened
by a line of eight narrow mini-towers, each housing a trio
of vertically stacked two-floor residences.
Windows on the towers’ facades are spaced regularly
in some places and irregularly in others. The architects
avoided the typical apartment building configuration of
bay windows combined with projecting balconies, and The Signature at Reston Town Center.
instead gave the towers a sleek, clean-sided appearance
consisting of crisply punched-in windows—a strategy
employed by modern buildings in Germany and elsewhere
in Europe—and balconies that are mostly recessed.
Designing each tower as an assemblage of rectangular
masses that intersect and slide past one another not only
gives them a sense of energy and movement, it also, the
architects noted, created additional corners, improving
the quality of interior light and the outward views for
many of the living units.
The project’s exterior materials “are modest—brick
masonry—but carefully chosen,” the architects said. “A
primary buff color with a custom slurry wash is contrasted
with a textured bronze ironspot color. The colors are
employed volumetrically on the building to highlight
the massing approach.”

58 STRENGTH IN NUMBERS Mid-rise “townhouse” section, consisting of stacked duplex Photo © Alan Karchmer/OTTO
units that obscure a portion of the parking garage behind.