SKE+CHED with Design Collective

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Hi, I'm Alyse Talbott, I work for Design Collective and I'm a Project Architect. Design Collective's philosophy is really to enhance the built environment and make better communities, better spaces for everybody. 

I've always been very interested in our built environment and how it affects how we live and I think it's really interesting that through good design we can actually enhance the community and make it a better place through the buildings we design. We really try to understand the context in which we're designing it, we try to take cues from surrounding buildings - the history, the people that live there now, and really make the best architecture possible for that area. 

Solaire 8200 Dixon is a mixed-use multi-family project, it is 27 stories tall, it has ground floor retail which will be a food hall - Silver Springs first ever Food Hall - it has above grade parking for the additional five stories and then above that there's 403 dwelling units. Working on this project and others like it is really exciting because you are creating a community - you're changing the urban environment to create a vibrant, safe place that people feel comfortable going to, walking in, passing through. 

The building has many different frontages and not really a true back which is a huge design challenge. It has the Dixon Avenue on the east side, it has the Metro red line and CSX running along the west, and the Metropolitan Branch Trail wrapping from the West to the South. Each side needs to be looked at from all different angles and all different approaches. With a 27-story building you really do need to do things to bring it back to a human scale, so a lot of times we look at and we focus on the first 20 feet - that's what you're going to be experiencing when you walk along the street. We were drawn to brick for this project because of its human qualities, it's tactile qualities, it has so much character to it and maybe part of that is because it's actually from the earth and you can't recreate that. 

We wanted two brick palettes and we wanted there to be a high contrast between the two so we went with the darker clay coat blend for the base and that really grounded the building and made it feel of the earth and then for the upper stories to lighten the rest of the high-rise we went with a lighter brick blend. Designing these projects you really are designing an entire community in one building. It's been so many years in the making it's great to see it finally come to fruition.