D.C. Building Brings Eye-Catching Glass Façade to Downtown Business District

Wrapped with floor-to-ceiling curved glass, the new 11-story office building at 2050 M Street NW in Washington, D.C. – midway between Washington Circle and Dupont Circle in the city’s Golden Triangle business district – reflects its surroundings like a giant kaleidoscope.

For Brian Carroll and his team, creating the 450,000-square-foot building’s advanced mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP) systems required taking a multi-faceted viewpoint, with one eye always focused on an unusual challenge: ensuring that national news and public affairs programs were never interrupted while the broadcaster’s new quarters were under construction next door.

“Usually we design a new building, then it gets built and then the occupants move in,” said Carroll, managing director of WSP USA’s Arlington office. “In this case, because the broadcaster was in the existing building that was being demolished, they had to be moved in phases into their new building before construction of the new tower located above and adjacent to it could begin. This necessitated detailed phasing plans along with the design of temporary HVAC and electrical power systems to allow for their relocation with minimal downtime.”

The building, located directly across Duke Ellington Park, also features four levels of underground parking for occupants and visitors, and a rooftop terrace and lounge with stunning views of downtown Washington, D.C. Each floor offers 25,000-34,000 square feet of space, with high ceilings and unobstructed views of the city.

The main challenge was ensuring cooling and power were always available for the sensitive television production equipment, according to Carroll.

“While there were redundant temporary cooling systems built to accommodate the phased transition, sometimes issues would come up, even right before a broadcast,” Carroll said. “We’d get urgent phone calls and had to jump in to help understand and solve the problems.”

“Throughout the project, as we moved the broadcaster from one space to another and into their new building, we always had to be aware of their production schedule to avoid interruptions,” he added.

The studio portion of the building was completed in 2018 to allow the TV network to move into the building before it was fully completed two years later.

Aside from managing the unique challenge of accommodating the broadcaster during construction, Carroll said he is proud of the MEP engineering design features that helped the project win Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. These features include onsite water reuse and stormwater capture.

“All of the water is collected and goes to a big cistern in the garage, where it’s used as make-up water for the HVAC system,” Carroll said.

The high-performance HVAC system WSP designed features energy recovery ventilation systems that capture and use energy that would otherwise be vented to the outdoors, as well as dedicated outside air system (DOAS) terminal units to efficiently heat and cool each zone of each floor. And because the DOAS units draw on 100 percent outside air, they help maintain optimally healthy indoor air quality.

Such energy-efficient HVAC systems have been used on WSP projects for at least 10 years, but only recently have they become the go-to systems in the Washington, D.C. market, according to Carroll.

“It’s gratifying to know that we’ve helped push the status quo for energy efficient HVAC systems,” added Carroll, who joined WSP as a mechanical engineer in 2007.

The building’s standout feature is the façade that features 978 identical 11-foot-tall glass panes along the building’s north and west sides,  11-foot-tall glass panes, designed by REX Architecture in collaboration with façade consultant Front Inc.

As described in The Architect’s Newspaper, the inwardly curved insulated glass units not only provide a visually striking appearance, their compressive strength allowed them to be fabricated without mullions – the vertical bars between glass window panes commonly used in building façades – creating a seamless appearance and adding to the “remarkable degree of transparency” enjoyed by occupants.

The curved glass, combined with a thin, high-performance low-E coating to reflect heat, not only improves the building’s overall energy efficiency, but adds to the strength of the glass and creates an unusual aesthetic … a kaleidoscopic appearance of repetitive reflection on the exterior of the building.

The design of the building was also praised in a recent feature article published by Architectural Record magazine.

Completed in 2020, 2050 M Street was developed by Tishman Speyer, designed by REX Architecture and Kendall/Heaton Associates and constructed by Davis Construction.

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