Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Video of Bethesda's (and Montgomery County's) new tallest building

Here's a new video of what will be the tallest building in Bethesda when completed. Carr Properties' 7272 Wisconsin Avenue development will also be the tallest building in all of Montgomery County. It is 290', but will likely come in higher than that if you include rooftop structures and equipment. The current tallest building in the county is North Bethesda Market in White Flint, which is 289' tall.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice video. Thanks for posting!

As you have indicated, adding the two-story high mechanical penthouse will indeed add about 30’ to the top, plus the measuring point for the base building entry is about 15’ above Wisconsin, so from the east side, the building will be about 335’ tall. Since the west side slopes down about 25’ to Woodmont, for an at grade access for the Purple Line, from the west side it will appear to be about 360’ tall.

I see that new renderings for the Wilson now show what appears to be a tall white screen wall to mask views of the satellite dishes on the roof. These add about 20’ to the visual height, plus about 30’ for their penthouse makes the office tower about 340’ tall.

From the construction webcam on the Clark construction site, which is only at about level 20 of the Elm, you can easily see the Capital Building, Washington Monument and I suspect the National Cathedral On the skyline. Likely a much more dramatic view from 9 levels higher. I imagine these towers will be visible from quite a distance. They are highly visible from downtown Chevy Chase and Silver Spring.

Anonymous said...

Good thing all these millions of sqft of office space are already under construction in downtown Bethesda. I'd imagine the next few years will see very few new starts, unfortunately.

Anonymous said...

Most commercial developers for several years now have stated that they thought downtown Bethesda would be fully saturated with Class A and Trophy speculative office development once the 4747 Bethesda, Wilson and Avocet Towers were complete. Bethesda Bio at the Sunoco site is now likely to proceed with all the recent investments in medical research. Older Class B and C office building will likely struggle to keep existing tenants now that expanded telework seems to be more viable and sensible for many companies.

In this case, perhaps downtown Bethesda will benefit by not having so many newer speculative office buildings being built, or clogging up the approval pipeline, like many area in NoVa. Of course corporate office headquarters might still be built, like Marriott. Hopefully the hospitality business will have recovered in 2022 when Marriott is proposing to move to their new HQ.