A mixed-use office development in Charlottesville, Virginia, seamlessly integrates into a prominent site within the city’s historic Downtown Mall district. The building’s stepped facade helps it conform to contextual scale and attain energy and water conservation, as well as occupant health and wellness.
Designed by Wolf Ackerman in the capacity of architect-of-record, with EskewDumezRipple as associate architect and interior designer, the 19,974-m2 (215,000-sf) Center for Developing Entrepreneurs (CODE) spans multi-use spaces, including a strategic combination of coworking, office space, shared amenities, and retail. The investor behind the development, a University of Virginia (UVA) graduate, wanted to give back to the community by providing a place where locally grown innovations in information technology, clean energy, and allied fields could blossom into locally based businesses—rather than seeing those ideas and talents relocate outside the region.
He wished for a solution which would straddle the line between rural connection and urban vitality, where workers might throw open a window and feel the mountain breeze, but simultaneously leverage the urban connections of a small city community and do so at a lower price point than comparable locations in larger cities. The owner loved the vibrance downtown Charlottesville offered, and he knew what differentiated this place from larger cities was its access to nature. In his view, the project needed to highlight and enhance both aspects.
Building the project in this particular district would reinforce a commitment to walkability, which the city—and especially its downtown core—is known for, but it posed the challenge of integrating a project of the requisite size with the small scale of the mall. In response, the design team introduced a novel solution: stair-stepping the massing up from the mall towards the intersection of Main and Water streets, then spiral up further to meet the scale of Water Street, with a cascade of occupiable terraces and green roofs.
As one approaches the site, CODE is only visible as a three-story structure of a similar width to the neighboring historic, party wall buildings. The building’s mass is revealed upon turning the corner, but it is arraigned as a backdrop to a new public plaza.
The building’s floor plan is an irregular A-shape, drawn so the office tower would be situated on the taller scale of Water Street, and the retail and coworking portions nestled around a triangular courtyard that opens onto the mall.
The program of CODE and its stepped facade simultaneously gave the building its form and created numerous connections to the environment, most noticeable in the exterior courtyards located on each floor. A conscious decision was made to shrink the indoor program to enable these terraces, which pull double duty for both sustainability and occupant health and wellness. The roofscape features native plants in regional soils, while simultaneously providing an inclusive, nearby sense of nature.
Mechanical equipment was strategically relocated away from these roofs to preserve their serenity. The roofscape, beyond being a living textbook of native plants and flora, is also a vital stormwater management performer. The roofs are blue roofs that soak up water like a sponge and release it slowly to trickle down into a large underground cistern. In times of drought, a reversal of this process happens—water is pumped back up to the roofs to irrigate plants. Within the building, low-flow fixtures in restrooms significantly reduce water consumption compared to a typical office building.
The design team also worked with building management to create building-wide standard water fixtures, establishing a culture of sustainable design for future tenants.
The inherent self-shading created by the building’s form allows the first two floors to be more transparent, furthering the connection between users and the public. The team drove the massing of the project to adhere to a strict 15.2-m (50-ft) window-to-window floor plate, helping to achieve natural cross-ventilation and excellent daylighting performance, despite a modest window-to-wall area ratio.
Rigorous analysis and simulation designed the envelope to meet the American Institute of Architects’s (AIA’s) 2030 challenge for efficiency and thermal performance. The building is slated to consume one-third of the amount of energy of a benchmark project of comparable size. Its energy use intensity (EUI) reading is 26, bettering the baseline energy use index by 73 percent.
High-efficiency HVAC systems, a combination of a dedicated outside air system (DOAS) for efficiency and fresh air turnover and fan-coil units for flexibility, were implemented to enable user customization, with individual controls per area—affording tenants all the air they need but only when and where they need it.
The building simultaneously draws on passive strategies. Design analysis estimates 40 percent of the year, the building should require neither heating nor cooling, via systems that can support occupant comfort.
Improved envelope performance was achieved through continuous insulation, with the envelope created to be rigorously detailed to enable self-shading. The building orientation, along with 0.31-m (12-in.) recessed windows, allow glazing to remain shaded for more of the day and permit less heat to be transferred through them. The design of the building incorporated low-emissions materials based on peer-reviewed research, and choices also considered carbon emissions associated with construction materials, resulting in a reduced carbon footprint during construction. The building’s envelope draws from the brick cladding and punched window openings of its historic context, but it is implemented with a modern rain screen to achieve high levels of insulation and thermal comfort while providing in-depth defense against water intrusion.
CODE has received a 2023 AIA National Honor Award for Architecture and a 2022 Louisiana AIA Honor Award, as well as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) v4 Platinum certification.
Other project collaborators were Fox & Associates as structural engineer; Timmons Group as civil engineer; 2RW as mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) engineer; Gregg Bleam Landscape Architect as landscape architect; DKT Lighting as lighting designer; STRUCTR Advisors as sustainability consultant; Hourigan as general contractor; and MSTB Commissioning Group as HVAC contractor. Additionally, Thornton Tomasetti provided energy modeling.
