Construction at the site of the future Solaire 7607 Old Georgetown Road apartment tower in Bethesda is now about two floors below street level. So we are still looking at the parking garage coming together here. Developed by Washington Property Company, the Solaire will house 198 units and 1500 square feet of retail, and is scheduled for delivery in late 2023.
I love the way they angle the columns to transfer the load from a column grid for parking, to a column grid for apartments. I imagine these sloping columns also help take the wind shear load.
ReplyDeleteThis slender tower will be a nice infill project, and will be about twenty feet taller than the nearby Chevy Chase Trust towers, so it will be the tallest tower in the area closest to the Metro, for awhile at least.
Any word on Brookfield’s Bethesda Metro 4? They have sketch and preliminary site plan approval, but were granted a three year extension on final site plan approval about one year ago. SOM needs to fire up their design department and get this new 300’ tall project entitled and built.
The inclined columns (the technical term) are a nice functional and aesthetic feature, but they are worse at taking gravity and lateral (wind and seismic) loads. They obv are sized to take the loads that structural engineers need them to, but they are not as efficient as vertical column.
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ReplyDeleteThanks for the info! I have designed about 165 buildings in my career so far, but have yet considered using any steeply inclined columns. They seem to be quite common on these tall multifamily buildings in this area, and apparently can help solve lots of planning issues. I guess I need to hire more creative structural engineers!