
With a zoning hearing coming up later this month, developers Brandywine REIT and Akridge have submitted additional materials to the Zoning Commission on their proposed
25 M Street, a 247,000-square-foot office building on the southwest corner of Half and M Streets, SE, currently home to the north end of the Fairgrounds.
The submissions expand on the details and renderings we
first saw a few weeks ago, but the basics remain the same. The building received
zoning approvals back in 2009, but now with a change in the development team and with an eye toward shifting desires of office tenants, some
modifications to the approvals are being sought, most specifically reducing the distance from the edge of the building to its core to 45 feet to allow for "more natural light flowing into the interior offices," which resulted in the building's gross floor area space being reduced by about 23,000 square feet.

There are also now new terraces on the
3rd, 4th, and 9th floors in addition to the roof, and the building will also have about 21,000 square feet of retail space. However, the planned third underground level of parking has been removed, with the building now having 157 spaces on two levels.
The drawings below show the new design as seen from street level on M Street looking east (left), on Half Street looking west (middle) and on Van Street looking east (right), while the one at the top of this post is the building's Half Street facade and the second is of the view at Half and M. The second and third photos below show the "Via", a pedestrian walk between 25 M and
JBG's planned Half Street residential project on the south end of the block.
The design was approved at Monday night's ANC 6D meeting 6-0-0--you can read the full text of the ANC's letter to the Zoning Commission about the project
here.
No timetable for construction has been announced, but it is now the third of the
three "
missing pieces" on the block of Half Street just north of Nats Park to go through the zoning approval process in the past year with a revised design. So maybe the neighborhood's most visible and most lagging block will be on its way to completion by the time the stadium celebrates its 10th anniversary--and hosts the All-Star Game--in 2018.