Project Description
An important part of the extremely successful redevelopment of the H Street corridor in Washington DC, the Apollo occupies the length of a city block and plays host to the neighborhood grocer store. The building program is for 400 apartments and 75,000 gsf of retail, including the neighborhood Whole Foods.
The large site is an assembly of a number of parcels and that have frontage on 3 different streets. Thus, the building behaves as something of an octopus with two “tenacles” or appendages occupying parcels attached to the main H Street lot. While the bulk of the site occupies 450 feet of block frontage along H Street, a prominent ‘tentacle’ stretches north and occupies 150 feet of frontage on I Street, and the second ‘tentacle’ reaches out to the east and occupies 50 feet of frontage on 7th Street. Eight and nine stories tall, the H Street frontage includes ground-floor retail and three stylistic and material building increments. The building increments modulate the scale of the building. The I Street frontage is three stories tall with a fourth level set back from the street wall. It has residential ground floor units and dooryards that reflect the townhouse fabric found there. The 7th Street frontage is a three-story, remote co-working loft just around the corner from the commercial H Street. From its outward appearance, one would be hard-pressed to conceptualize that this was a singular building as it morphs to respond to the context around it.