The retail village at Sycamore & Oak is a 23,000 square foot mass timber open air structure with a featured canopy, that sits upon the campus of St Elizabeths, a former mental hospital. The year-round pavilion is an entirely public space that serves as an incubator for 13 small local businesses, all owned by local residents. The project is the first phase of the ambitious St Elizabeths East Parcel 15 mixed-use development. The forthcoming development will integrate commercial spaces, healthcare facilities, public areas and residences, leveraging public and private investment to revitalize the entire campus.

The Mary Church Terrell House, located in the LeDroit Park Historic District at 326 T Street NW, is a three-and-one-half story Queen Anne style brick dwelling constructed by 1894 as a semi-attached dwelling. The mirroring building that abutted the house on the west side (328 T Street, NW) was demolished between 1953 and 1959 following a fire. The house was owned and occupied by Mary Church Terrell and her husband Robert Terrell from 1899 until 1913. In 1975, the residence was designated a National Historic Landmark (NHL) in recognition of Mary Church Terrell’s significant contributions to civil rights, voting rights, education, and humanitarian efforts, which helped transform the sociopolitical landscape of both the nation’s capital and the country. The property is also listed in the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP), the DC Inventory of Historic Sites, and is a contributing resource to the LeDroit Park Historic District.

The remodel and addition of Wellington Courtyard House was designed to accommodate a growing multi-generational family. Located in a low-rise residential hillside, it was essential to creatively expand the home to enhance the family’s quality of life, without imposing a large massing on the streetscape. To sensibly integrate the addition into the sloping topography at an affordable cost, we created a three-sided courtyard. This seamlessly mitigated site challenges and allowed most of the existing structure to be preserved and modified. The extended single roofline, horizontal wood cladding and linear ribbon window with thin metal trims on the front facade create a light-weight floating street presence. The metal fins protect privacy while offering a scroll of landscape view from the inside.

The Center, a place for education, entertainment, and research, is the permanent home for the 60,000-piece Louis Armstrong Archive—the world’s largest for any jazz musician—and a 75-seat venue for performances, lectures, films, community events, and education. It also features an exhibition that explores Armstrong’s five-decade career.

Located across from the existing House Museum, the 14,000-square-foot Center is the final piece of a larger campus that includes the home itself and Armstrong’s garden. Designed as an interpretation of Armstrong’s infinite love of music, guests are welcomed by a large canopy and front wall, creating an inviting urban forecourt that defines the building within the community. In a neighborhood comprising modest two-story houses, the Center is in proportion to its surroundings. The urban precinct notes the singular work of the man whose music underlies so much of what people listen to today. The Center simultaneously fits in and stands out—a paradox that reflects Armstrong’s life and work—recalling both the jazz and lyricism that were Armstrong’s leading achievements.

The project explores the possibility of interweaving transit and housing to create a Transportation Housing Network. This network enables occupants to commute to and from their work overnight (or any time of the day) directly from their living units. The units can be moved (or transported) to the destination via the suspended track system, which utilizes the wasted space under existing elevated highway networks. The goal of the project is to provide a concept that can eliminates the need of car commute and to alleviate stress on existing freeway systems and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Taking advantage of its prominent brownfield redevelopment site as a gateway to the Inner Harbor, the design for the project provides a distinctive global headquarters for Baltimore-based T. Rowe Price. Harbor Point is a 27-acre waterfront neighborhood located between Harbor East and Fell’s Point in Baltimore, Maryland. Comprised of two buildings linked by a lobby atrium, the T. Rowe Price Headquarters embraces its location on the waterfront, offering a walkable connectivity between a landscaped central plaza and the adjacent 4.5-acre Point Park. The pedestrian-scaled structures are crafted with locally inspired materials that echo the city’s vernacular. Large windows in the lobby atrium and office spaces offer views of the harbor, and bring natural light into the interior spaces. In addition to its office program, the design also includes public space, retail, roof gardens and amenity spaces. The project, most notably, focuses on the remediation of contaminated brownfield land, to re-establish a link between the city and the waterfront, incorporating new pedestrian links and an indigenous landscape. Throughout the design, a series of passive and active strategies have been adopted, to reduce whole-life carbon, increase resilience and comfort.