1400 Crystal Drive Office Building / FOX Architects

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Text description provided by the architects. Years before Amazon selected metropolitan Washington DC’s Crystal City neighborhood (now known as National Landing) for their HQ2, FOX Architects saw the potential for revitalizing this outdated and underutilized neighborhood. Comprised of partially vacant buildings constructed in the 1960s-1980s, developers and community members had long debated how to revitalize the neighborhood. FOX Architects envisioned a sustainable path to urban renewal through the practice of building recycling, exemplified in 1400 Crystal Drive: a 1968 structure transformed into a 310,000 SF, LEED Gold Certified, state-of-the-art office building. The existing building had many issues that needed to be addressed in order to update it for modern workplace needs and integrate it into a next-generation community setting. The goals were to transform the dated office building by weaving together old and new building systems through the original post-tension structure and to make the plazas and lobby more pedestrian and community oriented. By increasing daylight in the interior, adding square footage and amenities, and improving interior planning, the vision was to sustainably create a new, usable building instead of razing the old structure.