Colette at The Stacks
Colette creates a pedestrian-centric experience at The Stacks through rich brick detailing and an activated ground floor.
Colette is part of The Stacks, a new 6-acre, 2 million-square-foot mixed-use development on Washington, DC's Southwest Waterfront. The multi-building project includes a variety of residential and retail, with an emphasis on public open space. Rather than following the standard organizational grid of DC's blocks, The Stacks is broken into smaller blocks by a winding Corso that cuts through the neighborhood, creating open space and view opportunities. When complete The Stacks will include over a thousand apartments in a lively, walkable neighborhood anchored by human-scale buildings.
Colette, one of three buildings in the first phase, includes a mix of both traditional and co-living units, as well as a large co-working space and ground level retail. The boomerang-shaped structure is broken up visually in order to break down the scale; lower floors are clad in brick to create an intimate feel from the pedestrian's perspective, while upper floors are clad in a variety of façade types. A large co-working space has a separate entrance and includes an open-air roof deck.
The Stacks is organized so that the internal streets terminate into a building or a public square, creating something more complex than a standard gridded block.
The layout calls to mind the work of Camillo Sitte, the 19th Century Austrian planner who disliked the obsessive order of newly designed city squares, instead preferring the irregularity of the public spaces within older cities.
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