The Power of Architecture and the Promise of Place

When you enter a building you have not experienced before, how do you find your way around?  Signage always helps, and most buildings have that, but what other ways can architecture engage and orient you to your surroundings? Oftentimes, the answer to this question lies in the relationship between the building’s interior spaces and its exterior context.

Thoughtful design begins at the scale of the city, town, or campus. This means creating buildings that contribute positively to that context, from the exterior facades—scale, color, detail—to major interior spaces and circulation elements. Just as people are most comfortable on a familiar street or in a park that gives them a sense of rootedness in their community, a building’s interior organization should support that same sense of  familiarity, with internal relationships that  enhance our understanding of place with easy and meaningful visual connections outside, be it a campus quadrangle, a neighborhood street, or a cherished park. Achieving this goal is especially top of mind when we work with clients to design civic buildings and civic infrastructure in Washington D.C. or beyond.

Blending Contemporary Use with Historic Preservation

The Reservoir Park Recreation Center is organized as an extension of the spatial order of
the historic water filtration infrastructure.

The Reservoir Park Recreation Center is the featured civic program in a new, 25-acre mixed-use development in Northeast Washington. It is organized on two levels, with an entry framed by one of the historic portals to the underground cells of the former McMillan Reservoir water purification facility, whose sand filtration plant ensured clean drinking water for city residents throughout most of the 20th century.

Exterior and interior perspectives of the pool’s relationship to the park’s lower level and the water filtration infrastructure.

The new building’s upper level supports flexible community rooms that look out to and extend over a new park and playground to the west, engaging these interiors with the landscape and offering views toward Howard University’s campus and the city beyond. Downstairs, the new community pool is located on the same level as the former sand filtration cells that now form an extension of the new lower park.

The surrounding plaza is separated by glass but suggests a strong conceptual unity of both interior and exterior places. Thus, one can be a part of the park and also swim in the exact same space where clean water was being filtered for District residents many years ago.

Connecting the Urban and Pastoral for Local Book Lovers

The high level of transparency at the Cleveland Park Library entry and first floor engages its neighborhood context. Photos © Joseph Romeo

The Cleveland Park Library is organized with a large foyer— or forum— at grade, where tall bay windows provide a strong visual connection to the historic buildings that line DC’s prominent Connecticut Avenue corridor. Visitors can then proceed to a grand stair that spirals up to the Adult Collection Room, a journey that provides, yet again, panoramic views of the exterior context and strong connectivity to the building’s entry and first-floor rooms.

Glass walls book-end the Adult Collection room with balconies to make the outdoors a part of readers’ experience.

Upon arriving at the Adult Collection, one discovers a long reading room, bathed in light from a series of saw-toothed skylights and capped by large expanses of glass that frame the neighborhood commercial context on one side and Rock Creek Park on the other, each with balconies for outdoor reading.

This diagram demonstrates how the entry sequence from the retail corridor fronting Connecticut Avenue is connected to the main Adult Collection Room on the second floor.

The overall design refers to and amplifies the experience of place through visual cues and sensory experiences, such as easy access to the exterior in two places: the children’s garden on the ground level and the upper-level balconies that engage patrons of all ages directly with their unique surroundings.

Honoring a University’s Traditions with a New Campus Destination

An arcade at the base of Garvey Hall supports outdoor dining overhead—a multilevel transitional experience
between the building’s interiors and the adjacent campus quadrangle. Photos © Joseph Romeo

Access to the exterior is also key to the design of the new Garvey Hall dining commons at Catholic University. Sited to terminate a large campus quadrangle, the building provides an arched and columned stone arcade at grade, signifying the building as part of the campus’ public infrastructure. The arcade also supports two exterior dining terraces above, divided by a distinctive central tower and accessed from two large interior dining rooms. These terraces amplify the spaciousness of the new quad while also offering views to the distant landscape and a tactile experience at the building’s exterior.

The entire design concept is intended to extend the space of the quadrangle into the arcade, moving up via a central exterior stair and into the dining rooms.

This cutaway-section perspective shows the sequence from the quadrangle to the upper level, where
the campus community can enter the dining rooms and experience the outdoor balconies.

The journey upstairs culminates with an intimate courtyard that gives way to
the dining rooms and more outdoor seating.

The sequence continues once the visitor enters those dining rooms, reconnecting with the spaces they’ve just experienced outside. The orchestrated journey builds familiarity at both the scale of the campus and the scale of the building and offers a sense of place both inside and out.

Context and Character

The success of these three projects depended heavily on how well they would nestle into their existing, historically significant surroundings. Those environments informed every decision, from material selection to interior layout. Great design, in this respect, is a give and take: from inside out it should amplify the character of a building’s broader setting and also engage it more profoundly with its location. When well-conceived, these relationships serve to orient, celebrate, and enhance our broader understanding of place in our communities.