555 E Street SW
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- LocationWashington, DC
- General ContractorDonohoe Construction
- ArchitectFX Collaborative
- Property OwnerDutch Hospitality Company Citizen M, City Partners and Potomac Investment Properties
Project Overview
The 555 E Street SW project is a 12-story, 307,000 square foot mixed-use building comprising of affordable senior living and market rate apartment units (194 units total), and a 252-room Citizen M Hotel, conveniently located to the Wharf, the Mall, four (4) METRO stations and the 395 Southwest Freeway. The exterior façade incorporates two colors and size of brick integrated with window wall and metal panels. The street elevations utilize a Roman size (1-1/2 inches high x 16 inches long) in what is referred to as a 1/4-bond pattern (i.e. the brick above overlaps the brick below by one-fourth of the brick length, all in the same direction (see Figure 1). The first floor also has single Roman sized brick, stack bond piers. There were many challenges installing this brick and these patterns, including –
- Manufacturer ASTM length tolerances for 16-inch nominal brick are up to 3/8-inch difference; our masons had to take great care in the selection of units and alignment especially at the single stack brick piers (see Figure 2) and at narrow piers containing only 1 head joint.
- ASTM also has tolerances for both brick height and variation in plane, which increases with the length of brick; our masons were able to keep the bed joints consistent in appearance in spite of these increased tolerances.
- The Roman size brick (Glacier Gray) is produced with a manufactured coating over a through-body brick that produces the whitish gray color and variation; special care and handling is required to avoid removal of the coating and exposing the through-body brick color during both installation and cleaning.
The East Elevation and Interior Courtyard elevations utilized a 4”x 8” size brick with a blend of four colors (see Figure 3), which required the masons to be mindful of not bunching up any one color to any significant degree.
The building façade includes several terraces and step backs, and protruding balconies, all which required a combination of mast climbing, heavy duty swing stage and tube scaffolding to accommodate masonry installation (see Figure 5). The east elevation masonry also had to be performed in a manner that did not disrupt operations at the adjacent District of Columbia Forensics Laboratory. The Interior Courtyard starts at the 2nd Floor level, inaccessible from the street; thus, swing stage and tube scaffolding used there had to be disassembled and removed through the building by hand. One scaffold item that we did not find at all difficult to do was our support for the Washington Nationals during their World Series run (see Figure 4 – easily seen off the 395 Southwest Freeway).
Calvert Masonry’s scope of work also included the air/weather barrier behind all façade components inclusive of metal panel.
PROJECT DETAILS
- Over 275,000 face brick covering approximately 56,000 square feet
- 1,400 LF of Cast stone coping
- 100,000 square feet of Air Barrier