Circling the Wagons - 21st Century-Style

By Beth Herman

In pursuit of sweeping river vistas and the great outdoors, a young Bethesda, Md. family went west, in a manner of speaking, about 4.5 miles, securing a pristine lot on a Cabin John bluff overlooking the C&O Canal and roiling Potomac.

Tasked with building what would become a 4,589 s.f. four bedroom, four-and-a-half bath residence that provided comprehensive views of the evolving terrain, ecosystems and elements in all seasons, Mark McInturff and project architect David Mogensen of McInturff Architects confronted a not-so-uncommon Mid-Atlantic region issue. With 15-foot ceilings and an expansive southwest-facing wall of glass firmly on the family’s agenda, searing sun and heat—and their impact on heating and cooling—would require more than a conventional approach to climate control. What’s more, the homeowners wanted to spend the brunt of their day in an elevated wing, embracing their surroundings with an unobstructed view.

“When we first stood out there, the homeowner said she thought the main living spaces—living room, kitchen, dining room— should be on the second floor with the bedrooms below,” said McInturff, which he added is a strategy the firm often undertakes when considering the landscape.

Close the pod bay doors, HAL

In an effort to “circle the wagons,” according to McInturff, sheathing the home in adequate shading—kind of a preemptive strike before the sun heats the glass— European technology was employed in the form of computer-controlled exterior aluminum blinds.

“They’re almost like exterior venetian blinds but much more robust,” McInturff explained. “It’s technically fairly complicated and not inexpensive, though slowly creeping into the (U.S.) commercial market.”

Also acting as a buffer at night for high winds endemic to the coastal site, the louvers essentially allow the home to be closed down. “In a way the house is active,” McInturff said, affirming at the same time he does not endorse filled or tinted glass. “That’s like sunglasses or a Band-Aid. There’s a better way to do it, which is to prevent the sun from reaching the glass in the first place.”

With optimal energy efficiency on the homeowners’ dance card, geothermal HVAC systems, soy-based foam wall and roof insulation at R-21 and R-38 values, respectively, radiant heat throughout and passive strategies such as cross ventilation were utilized. On the entry side, which faces away from the river, a pitched roof provides for an 8-foot ceiling which ascends to 15 feet, accommodating the glass wall and band of clerestory windows. “Fifteen feet is a comfortable height which does a lot in terms of gathering natural light into the space; it becomes quite luminous,” McInturff said. An exterior overhang also precludes sun from flooding the space at this height, as the clerestories don’t have blinds.

On the lower level, two children’s bedrooms with 9-foot ceiling height, a bath and a “homework room” share a courtyard, with a master suite and private courtyard completing the composition. An outside paving motif is teased inside this level with the inclusion of a porcelain-tiled entry. A guest suite is featured above a garage, connected by the upper level living spaces, but which reads like two buildings.

On the exterior, factory-finished metal siding and metal-clad windows provide for a tighter, more energy-efficient envelope, with masonry used for the same purposes on the home’s lower level. When the sun goes down, indirect and strategic uplighting are key components in the residence’s energy conservation quest.

According to the architect, a balcony or loggia with durable ipe decking was located off the second level on the view side. Here, too, operable aluminum blinds off the railing can protect the home and outdoor materials from the ravages of intense sun, with the added aesthetic of a modified closure providing a beautiful, dappled light.

“It’s a house we really love and have put a lot of work into,” McInturff said.

Just Stepped Out

By Beth Herman

When a recent story on staircases from around the world piqued the interest and curiosity of readers, DCMud decided to explore what the District’s own native sons and daughters of architecture and design could offer to the mix, with results that ran the gamut from edgy to resourceful to sublime.

Using materials such as painted steel with Douglas fir, or maple, chestnut and etched glass, area architects have climbed up and stepped out way ahead of the pack, melding the practical with the magical, taking the concept of a necessary staircase to a whole new level.

Cabin (John) in the sky

For Principal Bob Wilkoff of Archaeon, Inc. Architects, the expanse of the firm’s office building in Cabin John, Md. was limited due to a tight lot. A structure designed to preserve and accommodate an existing 60-foot tall Sycamore tree and restrictive front yard setback demanded a spiral stair, but as it was an office with considerable traffic, the architect made the staircase 7-feet, 6-inches in diameter for comfort. Shop painted steel construction with helix handrails provides contrast to the grid of 49 18-by-18-inch windows. Treads are ribbed industrial rubber flooring.

Turret trumps all

When expanding a 1940s Tudor structure for a family in NW D.C., Wilkoff created a 6-foot diameter steel spiral stair that descends from the second floor master bedroom suite to the first floor family room. Located behind glass French doors to mitigate sound, carpeted treads in a fully glazed turret complete the airborne design.

Soaring solarium

For Principal Amy Gardner of Gardner Mohr Architects LLC, a uniquely renovated 21-foot high 1969 solarium—part of a D.C. residence—called for a staircase redolent of light and lightness. “The idea for the stair was to make a simple sculptural zigzag shape that appears to float,” Gardner said, noting the area under the stair blends into the floor, helping it appear to do so. Maple treads and risers with polished edges, and especially a translucent etched glass and steel handrail with stainless steel glass clips, add an additional lofty quality to the design.

Stairway to heaven

When renovating a Potomac, Md. residence—essentially a retreat for its occupants—a wooden tower with meditation and massage rooms and a lower level gym were included. McInturff Architects featured a staircase that connects the home’s three levels made of painted steel and Douglas fir, with maple stair treads, backed with Galvalume sheet steel.

Halo Linea low-voltage track lighting is built into a slot in the steel structure of the stair.

Cold at the top

In purchasing and reimagining their own “profoundly mediocre” 1960s standard developer-type home in Winchester, Va., architects Chuck Swartz and Beth Reader of Reader & Swartz Architects concede their staircase is the “most curious” on which they’ve ever worked.

“You can stand on top of the refrigerator that way, which seems like a ridiculous thing to do, except there are books up there,” Swartz said.

Addressing a technical problem with brick veneer on the sides of the building that just stopped at one point, the two gable ends were skeletonized so that they were just studs. Two-by-fours running horizontally were located every four feet, with structural insulated panels on the outside of the building. “We then over-windowed it,” Swartz said.

Left with a skeleton inside on the gable ends, shelves were created off of two-by-two’s that ran horizontally so the gable ends became large libraries. The end without the staircase is served by a rolling ladder from an old telephone building, as Swartz’s father worked for the telephone company.

At the other end, a very large refrigerator was obtained as Swartz loves to cook, encased in a birch veneer red-stained plywood box. An alternating tread staircase was positioned on the side of it, allowing the occupants to walk up and climb on top of the refrigerator to access all the books.

Additionally, the staircase becomes a kind of a sculpture in and of itself, featuring alternating treads and maple shelves as they ascend, held together by red oak that’s stained black. It also acts as a graduated display for art, artifacts and family objects.

A place for us

In Frederick County, Va., another singular Reader & Swartz staircase has several things going for it, among them bleachers made out of chestnut, which is the same as the floor, and which go up to the landing. “They stop so the children in the household can play or you can display things on them,” Swartz explained.

In addition, every other tread—the treads that are not the bleachers—are little maple rafts that sit on them and look like small crates. Once you get to the landing, the part that gets you all the way to the second floor is steel and open treads of the same maple. “It’s a way to think of a staircase as a little stage or amphitheater, or a place to sit and think about whether some of the pieces of the staircase can be different than others and still meet the building code,” Swartz quipped.

Some photos courtesy of Anice Hoachlander and Ron Blunt. 

The Architect Also Rises

By Beth Herman

For intrepid Bethesda, Md.-based architect Mark McInturff of McInturff Architects, the brass ring opportunity to create what the press, and later the awards gods, would consider a monument to an equally intrepid theatre company wasn't found in a box of Cracker Jacks. Nor was it left under his pillow, or handed to him on a platter of warm Toll House cookies. For McInturff, who specializes in residential architecture, the opportunity to design a three-story, 35,000 s.f., 265-seat theatre replete with offices, production shops, a rehearsal hall, classroom space and two cafes in the Washington D.C.’s vibrant Penn Quarter wasn't a cakewalk, but it did come as a life-altering experience. "We were up against some big firms,” McInturff recalled about his somewhat unanticipated quest to build a new home for Washington’s audacious Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, “and some theatre firms – people who’ve done a lot of that kind of work – people with a big name for it: New York firms – and us.” By chance, according to McInturff, in the early stages of development, a member of Woolly Mammoth’s search committee had heard about the architect’s award-winning home designs and had said, “Maybe he can do a theatre,” McInturff quipped, still a bit incredulous that he eventually won the job. When push came to shove and the committee was in the home stretch of a painstaking selection process, McInturff said, “I told them, ‘The bad news is I haven’t done this before, and the good news is I haven’t done this before. So it’s going to be tailored to you and not to the last client I did a theatre for.’” Too Many Cooks Located at 641 D Street NW, and part of a large, mixed-use development for the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation, wherein an arts component is government mandated, the theatre is a space within a building, or actually in the basement of the building, called the Jefferson at Penn Quarter - now the Lafayette condos. According to McInturff, at one point he and his team were, in fact, battling the developer in terms of the amount of parking space the latter needed for 421 condominiums and an array of shops, vs. using it for theatre space. “It really was about taking a piece of a building which was of almost no other use and making it work as a pretty significant cultural institution,” the architect stated. Sited 100 feet into the block and under a courtyard, and though largely subterranean in nature, McInturff said there were three floors in all that needed to factor into the design, noting “…it was very hard to decipher their relationships. They didn’t stack up – the way they went together.” He also recalled attending a play at the theatre’s former home in an industrial building off 14th

Street, where the space felt very constricted and the lobby separated the dressing rooms from the theatre itself. “It was not a conventional relationship (of rooms),” he reflected, explaining that patrons could be purchasing tickets and the actors, occasionally even nude depending on Woolly Mammoth’s de rigeur programming, would have to cross through to the stage. “The whole thing of seeing an actor in a public way - and then going back and watching them in the show – I thought that was really kind of interesting to take what is normally backstage and bring it forward,” McInturff said, compiling his list of possible components for the new space.

Raw Ingredients 

Inspired by Woolly Mammoth artistic director Howard Shalwitz and his peers, whom McInturff calls “brilliant, dedicated, tenacious and respectful of everyone’s creative process,” and at his own expense at the outset of the project, the architect elected to take a small contingent from his firm, including architects Julia Heine and Stephen Lawlor, on a kind of fact-finding expedition to London’s theatre district. Emblematic of the Woolly Mammoth’s proclivity for risk-taking, McInturff said he was not afraid to take his own risks and reveal how little he knew about the soul of a theatre, and how much he wanted to learn. Prevailing upon Shalwitz and a group from Woolly Mammoth to accompany his firm, McInturff asked the D.C. theatre contingent to show them “things that they really loved.” Accordingly, each afternoon was spent touring green rooms and back-of-the-house elements of a specific theatre, with a return to that theatre at night to observe the production itself from several different vantage points. “At intermission we’d switch seats,” McInturff explained, “so you could be in the mezzanine – you could be anywhere – and by the time you left at the end of the night, you understood the space entirely.” He also said that among the key ingredients produced by this kind of investigation was the intimacy ratio: audience to actors, which would inform his D.C. design. “The next day we did it again, and the next day we did it again,” he said of the firm’s multi-theatre experience. “It was very exciting. I was simply a sponge.”

Layers and Layers

Assimilating the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation structure’s raw, coarse basement-type elements (exposed concrete; block walls; unrefined joints, to name just a few), along with the building’s aforementioned directionless tiers and the findings of the London junket, into McInturff Architects’ ultimate design, the results were what Shalwitz eventually termed the “transparent theatrical laboratory.” Loosely based on open-concept restaurant design where everything is visible, the theatre’s offices, classrooms, rehearsal spaces and more are exposed to the public, some behind glass panels, communicating that while its thespians are widely celebrated, the Woolly Mammoth machine is far greater than actors on a stage. “All most people see when they go to a theatre is a small lobby, they see the show, and then they go home,” McInturff explained. “When you come to the Woolly, you understand that this is the result of tremendous amounts of effort by a lot of people working in the background, whether it’s the people in the office, or the box office, or in set design, or in rehearsal, or in classrooms – all leading up to what you are going to do, which is to see the event itself.” And the feeling of “the theatre within the theatre,” McInturff said, in respect to the courtyard model seen in London and reproduced in D.C., where the audience surrounds the stage on three sides, is manifested in a warm, wooden space within a concrete shell – like furniture dropped into a black box, he explained. The design is such that the audience connects and experiences real participation. “This really was one of the great projects of my life,” McInturff reflected, speaking to Woolly Mammoth’s commitment and creativity and his own personal journey, and comparing the theatre’s design and execution to building another signature residence. “It felt like doing a big house – a family house,” he observed. “It was the same kind of emotional involvement I have with my residential clients. I would just call it a different kind of house.”

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