The popular image of Washington's Georgetown district—prim polished houses, fashionable restaurants, exclusive shops—neglects the traces that remain of its pre-Revolutionary origins as a port and industrial center that prospered into this century before falling into decline, hurried toward its demise by an elevated freeway along the river edge. In the late '60s, however, gentrification began to reverse the cycle, and the area has since become a hub of preservation and renewal as residential and commercial development edges toward the riverfront. Nonetheless, it was the original industrial character of the area that SOM sought to perpetuate in its Georgetown debut with an office and retail project abutting the freeway and fronting on Thomas Jefferson Street—the entry axis to a large mixed-use waterfront development. The stout cast-stone-trimmed red-brick structure is indeed reminiscent of turn-of-the-century manufactories and warehouses, with such genre Georgetown embellishments as the chunky turrets and double chimney pots. Its imposing presence and monumental free-form composition, though, attest the dominant influence of Richardsonian-Romanesque, confirmed in entrances announced by high expediments and triple archways, the echoes of window triads culminating in half arches, the building-long procession of low wide arches framing shop entrances on the Jefferson Street facade, the subtle use of ornamental brick, and a host of details large and small. To further diminish a bulk already constrained by Georgetown's 90-foot height limit, the sixth floor of offices is disguised by a sloping glass wall that reads as a mansard roof, and the topmost floor is set back yet another notch, almost wholly concealing it from the street. Because the site falls nearly 15 feet from north to south, the building is broken into two segments, allowing the insertion of an eighth floor at ground level on the south. To open inner offices to light and views, the structure's upper and lower levels are pierced by generous cortiles giving onto retail stores and a restaurant-to-come. Though linked, the courts are offset to reinforce the diagonal path between the main corner entrance and the corner opposite, leading visitors and workers through formal gardens sparingly planted to direct attention to focal fountains. To contrast but complement these open-air rooms, the courts are cloistered by sheltering loggias and a joining arcade of broad brick arches, a reminder against the inner walls' unadorned planes of the exterior's sturdy solidity.

Architectural Record January 1986

Metropolitan Square

A marked test of SOM's affinity for traditional Washington came with the development of the Metropolitan Square office complex on a prominent three-quarter-block site at the juncture of the federal precinct (the White House is half a block away and the massive Treasury Building directly opposite) with the tired but fast-rejuvenating "Old Downtown" business district. Insinuated among an eclectic assortment of elderly neighbors, the project also incorporates three landmarks: the Metropolitan Bank, a Beaux Arts sliver mirroring the Treasury's monumental colonnade; the adjoining former home of the once-noted Keith-Albee theater; and the interior of the Old Ebbitt Grill, long a popular local watering hole. The L-shaped building leaves the landmarks' facades intact around updated innards while introducing a new 12-story mass to abut the Keith-Albee building on the G Street side, and filling out the 15th Street block with a more delicately inserted corner segment attached to the bank. On the interior these elements are woven together by a skylit atrium ringed with street-level shops and restaurants—including the Old Ebbitt Grill whose vintage fittings are now ensconced behind the Keith-Albee's triple-arched entry arcade.

The larger office block rises from a two-story limestone base that reiterates the classic details and rustication of the landmark buildings' foundations. Though less forcefully defined than in SOM's latest work, crown and midsection are sketched at the third and tenth floors by balustrades across recessed glazing. On other floors, windows form flush squared bays framed by a structural grid that recalls the rhythmic pilaster and window pattern of the adjacent Keith-Albee facade. Even so, direct confrontation between the old and new faces is avoided by a deep niche at the critical joining. Similarly, upper floors set well back from the landmark facades, unseen from nearby vantages, preserve the original street scale and the strong line of the old buildings' pronounced crowns, now carried to the new corner element as well. With the Beaux Arts bank as centerpiece of the composition, the balancing addition takes its primary cues from the robust reticence of the Keith-Albee facade, establishing through profile and proportion a kinship reinforced by stylized but recognizable details from door to dormer. (The partners are especially pleased with their abstraction of the Keith-Albee's Corinthian capitals, rendered in the new section with a shift from limestone to Stony Creek granite to emulate with color the shading and texture of the original.)

98

Metropolitan Square
Washington, D. C.

**Owner:**

The Oliver T. Carr Company

**Architects and engineers:**

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill/
Washington, D. C.

**Associated architects:**

Vlastimil Koubek, AIA
(construction documents and
administration)

**Engineers/consultants:**

Baskam & Jurczyk, P. C.
(structural); General Engineering
Associates (mechanical); Claude
Engle (lighting)

**Contractor:**

The George Hyman Construction
Company

Dan Cunningham

Architectural Record January 1986 99