360° H Street

360° H Street helps anchor the western edge of H Street NE, one of the corridors devastated in the 1968 riots.  The District of Columbia is setting the future stage for this important corridor by investing in the infrastructure for a street car line and improved streetscape.   360° H Street transforms a once vacant site into a vibrant mixed use development with 212 residential units over 43,000 sf of retail and 270 below grade parking spaces.  

Previously occupied by a defunct gas station, the site owners were confident that the street’s fortunes were improving, and developed a mixed-use apartment program, negotiating the deal for the first grocery store east of the Capitol in fifty years. The site was flanked on one side by the monumental, multi-level garage of Union Station and on the other by the rambling assemblage of small-scale commercial buildings and retrofitted rowhouses that characterized most of the street. We designed the buildings as a transition between the two, articulating it as two distinct structures. Placing the grocery store on the eastern, Hub side we embedded it in a six-story volume with a red-brick, industrial-inspired language to establish an emphatic beginning to the street. The adjacent volume, clad in yellow brick, related to the smaller H street facades, picking up on one of their most distinctive features with a prominent set of metal-clad vertical bays. We subdivided the ground-level grocery store façade into multiple sections to read as individual shop-front windows. Proximity to downtown afforded great rooftop views of the Capitol and Library of Congress domes, which we maximized by creating an elaborate roof terrace with an extensive green roof.