Building of the Day Tour: 1200 19th Street NW

This Building of the Day tour, presented as part of AIA DC’s Architecture Month programme, focuses on the rooftop amenity expansion at 1200 19th Street NW in Washington DC, a project that required careful structural retrofitting of an existing commercial building to accommodate a new programme at the uppermost level. The tour is led by members of the design and engineering team and is structured around the technical decisions that made the project possible.

The core subject of the tour is adaptive reuse of the commercial asset: how an existing building with a fixed structural frame and a constrained urban site was redesigned to deliver new value without demolition or replacement. The rooftop expansion required detailed analysis of the existing structure’s capacity, a considered approach to added load and a creative resolution of the planning and building code constraints that apply to work at height in DC’s closely regulated urban fabric.

The Building of the Day format is a signature element of Architecture Month, giving practitioners direct technical access to buildings they could not otherwise enter, in the company of the people who designed and built them. Tours are organised through the District Architecture Center and registration is available at dcarchcenter.org.