If you spend much time on 4th Street in the Yards, you can be forgiven for looking at the concrete skeleton rising up next to the Foundry Lofts and assuming that Forest City's
Arris is going to just be another boxy DC apartment building.
And that is more or less true--for the five floors that have been built.
But there's for the next six floors, there's going to be a shift, as the design--by
Robert A.M. Stern Architects--turns into a very angled, wavy, and even slightly off-centered ultra-modern offering. It's going to look like a glass tower was plopped not-altogether-carefully on top of a rectangular brick low-rise offering.
Look closely at the renderings (click to enlarge), which both show the building from Water Street, and compare them to the above photo, counting the floors already constructed to confirm that along 4th Street the construction is about to look very un-rectangular:
On the building's west side, next to the Foundry Lofts, there will be no glass top, but instead three eight-story mini-towers, with two private courtyards. It's not quite so easy to get photos that clearly show the "reverse-E" outline of the west side, but I did at least try.
The from-above rendering also gives a good view of the rooftop "amenities deck" on the glass tower.
One thing not readily apparently in the drawings is how much taller this building is going to be than anything nearby. So, get ready for a veeeeeery different skyline in the coming weeks.
Arris has 20,000 square feet of retail on three sides of the building's ground floor, facing 4th, Tingey, and Water streets, and the building is scheduled to open late this year or early next year.
There's more drawings and photos on my
project page, including some "before" shots of the building's footprint that emphasize how much this block has changed, even before work started on Arris.