West End Square 50
Washington, D.C.
Award of Merit

Owner: EastBanc
Lead Design Firm: WDG Architecture PLLC
General Contractor: Clark Construction Group LLC
Subcontractors: Clark Concrete; Clark Foundations; RV Carey’s (Plumbing); Brother’s Mechanical Inc.; Dynamic Contracting Inc. (Drywall); Fort Myer Construction Corp. (Utilities and Sitework); Demolition Services Inc.

The eclectic West End Square 50 brings a two-level District of Columbia fire station, a 20,000-sq-ft squash facility and 61 affordable-housing units under one roof. The project is the result of two decades of effort to help revitalize Washington, D.C.’s West End neighborhood.

The mixed-use building consists of one floor of below-grade parking and nine floors above grade. Three sections of the structure stack on top of each other like boxes of different sizes. The residential levels are cantilevered slabs that hang from four transfer girders on the roof. That allows the residential floors to appear offset from the levels below them.

The facility’s squash levels include architectural sloping columns and polished concrete floors. The columns extend 22 ft from the third-floor slab to the underside of the fourth-floor slab.

Clark Concrete’s workers placed the 8,000 psi, self-consolidating concrete mix into forms stretching 22 ft high.

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