Title: Dumbarton Oaks Fellowship House
Location of Proejct: Washington, DC
Project Completion Date: October 22, 2014
Firm Name: Cunningham | Quill Architects

Short Description: The Dumbarton Oaks Fellowship House is an adaptive-reuse project located in Washington, DC, which dramatically converted a 1950s typewriter factory into a gracious student housing building with twenty-five dwelling units for Dumbarton Oaks’ annual post-doctorate student fellows, as well as public spaces for the Dumbarton Oaks' community. Effectively stripped down to the shell, the existing building was repurposed with robust new additions that were configured to take advantage of the site geometry while maintaining the integrity of the original building and creating usable outdoor spaces. The site also underwent significant improvement to provide attractive landscaping within a tight urban footprint.

Architect's Statement: The Dumbarton Oaks Fellowship House is an adaptive-reuse project that converted, and added on to, a 1950s commercial building ,originally used as a typewriter factory, into a gracious student housing building. Located in the Georgetown neighborhood, the new 32,000 SF building provides twenty-five dwelling units for the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection’s annual student fellows and their families, as well as a robust amenity program for the Dumbarton Oaks’ community. Owned by Harvard University, the historic Dumbarton Oaks’ main campus is one block away from the Fellowship House, and is tucked into a leafy corner of a residential street. The Fellowship House commands attention at a busy main avenue corridor and is able to provide Dumbarton Oaks with a public face for its famed fellowship program.

Located on a corner lot, the Fellowship House fronts a commercial corridor and backs up on a traditional Georgetown residential street. The existing building was largely stripped down to the brick masonry shell and demolished on the rear and side elevations to allow for additions that expanded the building footprint to meet the robust program goals. The new three-story, brick-veneer and copper-clad additions at the rear are rotated to take advantage of the site geometry while maintaining the integrity of the original building and creating usable outdoor spaces, and which allows a very irregular site to be reintegrated into the existing Georgetown grid. The copper-clad penthouse addition, serving as a public amenity space, steps in from the building parapet and is surrounded by intensive green roof plantings and an outdoor terrace, which combine to provide peaceful, private, and lush outdoor spaces that are aimed to be an extension of the famed Dumbarton Oaks' gardens.

The architectural and landscape history, and how they relate to the central mission of Dumbarton Oaks, was of vital importance in understanding how best to approach the design and planning process of the Fellowship House. Boasting an architectural and landscape confluence of McKim, Mead and White, Beatrix Ferrand, Phillip Johnson and Robert Venturi, the main campus is both playful and formal with “old” and “new” meshing constantly throughout the grounds. The Fellowship House, while on a tight corner lot fronting a commercial corridor, pursued this concept of blending “old” and “new” in massing, in material selection and exterior detailing, as well as with the injection of lush landscaping framed with playful hardscaping.

Providing a sense of place was a crucial goal in developing the design of the Fellowship House. Adopting the early adage, “where fellowship occurs,” led to the design team to pursue interior and exterior spaces that allowed the fellows and Dumbarton Oaks’ community to intersect and interact, as well as to reflect on their opportunity to be a part of the Dumbarton Oaks lineage. The architecture supported this by providing intimate spaces with calm material palettes and crisp detailing, juxtaposed with curated design objects from the Dumbarton Oaks collection.

The floor plan was studied and worked on intensely by the design team in order to most effectively fit a robust program into a tight urban footprint. Dwelling units are configured into furnished but flexible studio, one-bedroom, and two-bedroom arrangements, with multi-use spaces to support Fellowship life, education, and health. The amenity programming includes the ground-level Garden Room (gathering place), lower level fitness room, sound-proof Music Room, family lounge, and the fourth floor Oak Room (presentation space). The public amenity interior spaces employ solid, clear-finished white oak millwork and limestone panels for a calm, but crisp and bright palette and which visually connect these spaces across multiple floors.

The new exterior material palette consists of brick veneer, flat-seam copper paneling, limestone paneling, stainless steel cable vegetation-training assembly, and new aluminum windows and doors throughout. The palette was intended to be simple and calm with a focus on materials that exhibit a softness and hand-formed qualities instead of a commercial flatness. The oversized brick veneer was selected to closely match the existing brick size, color and texture, but the new additions utilize the playful Flemish bond pattern with accent headers in juxtaposition of new and old. The hand-formed flat-seam copper paneling was pre-patinated to avoid the “raw” penny copper appearance, which allowed the copper and brick to contrast and to enhance the softness of the material palette.

The site also underwent significant improvements to provide attractive landscaping surrounded by hardscape materials that combine to create intimate exterior gathering spaces and also to meet the parking requirements. The previously existing asphalt parking lot was demolished, grade leveled, and a new playful hardscaping pattern was employed which incorporates a combination of precast granite, bluestone and concrete pavers and which is surrounded by lush landscaping. The parking lot now doubles as a courtyard space used for outdoor functions and which accomplishes a whole-site approach in developing a new sense of place.