Monday, July 18, 2011

IMF's Dupont Hotel on Path to Redesign


The IMF wants to clean up its hotel image. No, not the mental image of DSK in a hotel room (eww), but its image in Dupont Circle-West End, where it has run a nondescript apartment-hotel since 1991 for visiting professionals from the IMF and World Bank. The stately location - a visible corner 2 blocks from Dupont Circle at 21st and New Hampshire Ave. - may offer a convenient respite for employees, kitchenettes and multilingual staff, but its tired structure needs a reinvention befitting its international clientele.

To that end, the IMF will gut and refit the 10-story structure, now with 100 apartment units, into a more contemporary visage, taking the same shape as the existing edifice, and sell the smaller of the two buildings that now make up the Concordia Hotel. The IMF will employ Washington D.C. architects Bonstra | Haresign to redesign the '60's motif by gutting the building and keeping the existing concrete frame.
The IMF will sell off the Bond Building (see picture below), now accounting for 78 of the 178 units of the Concordia and connected on the ground floor. Initial plans are for a LEED Gold certified building that will slightly increase the interior space with the same footprint, gaining additional units over the current 100-unit configuration, adding rooftop amenities for residents. The Concordia, appraised by the DC government for $58m, was designed in 1965 by Berla & Able who, in a more inspired moment, also designed the Omni Shoreham hotel in Woodley Park.

Next door, Bonstra | Haresign's designs are already coming to fruition. The architects designed a pavilion that will add more retail to the corner of New Hampshire and M Streets in the West End, where Meiwah now sits. Construction is about midway to completion.

Even if the thought of DSK makes the idea of staying in an IMF hotel unappealing, at least the avenue will get what is expected to be an upgrade, erasing one more '60's building.

Building permits have not yet been issued for the project.

Washington D.C. real estate development news

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

May be you guys should include in your article that they laid off their employees without a penny for all those years that they've worked for them!its very sad.go to hell IMF

Anonymous said...

What did you expect them to do...pay you while you sit at home on your a**? They're not the government you know.

Anonymous said...

I am talking about severance pay idiot..!or u should ask this F*** of DSK why from were he got 200000$ for just leaving his office + plus a golden retirement pension ...shut the f**** up moron!

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