The parking garage at the Parks at Walter Reed, a new mixed-use development in northwest Washington, D.C., looks like any other underground facility.
But this garage had a much different journey to being built than a run-of-the-mill parking deck. Instead of building a new garage, the development team opted to reuse an existing garage built about six decades ago, and the documentation was sketchy.
“We had things thrown at us that we weren’t anticipating,” Julian Goldman, an architect and associate principal at Torti Gallas & Partners, told CoStar News. “In order to get to the desired outcome of a functional parking garage, everyone had to be twice as clever.”
Parking has emerged as an issue in urban planning, as some cities have tried to reduce the number of parking spaces at new projects to fight traffic congestion and encourage developers to pack more into their sites. In 2022, California approved a law banning minimum parking requirements at new developments within a half-mile of public transit. Washington, D.C., is considering a measure to reduce parking requirements for publicly assisted affordable housing developments located near public transit.
No such restrictions on parking exist at The Parks at Walter Reed, a 67-acre, 3.1 million-square-foot redevelopment of the former Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington’s Takoma neighborhood. The project's developers are Hines, Urban Atlantic, Triden Development Group and Bridge Investment Group.
A significant part of the project involved the removal of gates that closed off the Army center from the surrounding neighborhood and reconnecting the property with existing surface streets. That’s where the parking garage comes into play. Although public transit buses pass through the Parks at Walter Reed, it’s a five-minute walk to the nearest Metro rail stop. Many residents and visitors will need cars to access it.
The parking garage is partially underneath a new Whole Foods Market and The Hartley multifamily property. Hines, Urban Atlantic, Triden and Bridge paid $17.4 million in 2020 for the 1.5-acre site where The Hartley and Whole Foods are located. During the initial design phase, the Torti Gallas team realized that the parking structure was not going to be a routine step in the development process.
The Parks at Walter Reed developers decided to convert the existing Army-built garage as a way to limit the project's carbon emissions. One way to limit carbon is to renovate existing structures rather than build new, a process that often requires pouring thousands of cubic yards of new concrete.
The original garage wasn’t easy to manipulate, however, because the Army used industrial-strength building materials during construction in the 1960s, said Scott Welch, an architect at Torti Gallas.
“The bones of this parking garage were built to probably withstand some sort of attack,” Welch said.
The designers later discovered that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers left behind only threadbare information about the garage’s building specs. Blueprints that were located were missing pages and some pages were mangled and illegible.
The Army Corps "probably didn’t assume that someone would come along later and do what we were doing,” Welch said.
With the measurements that could be read, the designers realized many of the numbers were off, especially with the elevations.
“What we knew for a fact was that each floor of the garage sloped in two different directions,” Welch said. “We couldn’t trust the elevation measurements in the blueprints.”
Torti Gallas ended up hiring GPRS TruePoint, a provider of 3D laser scanning services, to conduct a laser scan of the entire structure to get accurate measurements. It was an extremely rare step in a typical construction project.
“We had to know exactly where a column was located, or a concrete slab,” Welch said. “There wasn’t rebar [steel rods used to reinforce concrete] in places where the blueprints said they would be.”
More problems emerged during an examination of the original property survey. The property lines were not drawn correctly for the underground structure. A new geolocation model was created to address the survey’s shortcomings.
During the construction phase, the summer season revealed more issues. The original roof did not include joints to allow for thermal expansion because the structure was buried. During hot weather, the roof started cracking, “and concrete beams were slamming into the wall on the other side,” said Goldman with Torti Gallas. Waterproofing and structural reinforcements were installed to address the problem.
“It was like a surgical intervention,” Welch said. “This was much more like Swiss cheese — do we keep this beam, do we keep this column?”
The design and engineering team also had to grapple with an underground stream that passes directly below the Whole Foods. After considering several options, they installed a sump pump that can redirect 9,600 gallons of water per minute.
The ambitious overall Parks at Walter Reed project includes 300,000 square feet of office and healthcare space, a 200-key hotel, a language-immersion school and 20 acres of public parks and plazas. The plan also calls for the preservation of several historic U.S. Army buildings. About 32 acres of the campus are earmarked for development by the U.S. State Department as a central meeting place for foreign missions.
About 70% of the residential segment of the project is complete and includes condos, apartments, townhouses, senior housing, assisted living and coliving units, according to a Hines spokeswoman.
When Torti Gallas team members toured the Walter Reed site before the project got underway, the group ran out of time before they could visit the space where the parking garage is located.
“If we had had 20 more minutes, we were going to end the tour at the garage location,” Goldman said.
Welch and Goldman acknowledged that if they had seen the garage site during that tour and knew what they now know, they probably wouldn’t have taken this route.
“It would have been a lot simpler to just build a new garage,” Welch said.
The 840-space, two-level parking garage is now in use and, surprisingly to Goldman, probably doesn’t warrant a second thought by visitors as to how it came into existence. The entrance ramp, parking slots, signage, walls and elevator all look like any other parking garage, he said.
“It surprised me how normal it looks,” Goldman said.
For the record
Lisa Stoddard, Jen Fink and Bridget Crotty of CBRE are retail leasing agents for the Parks at Walter Reed. Bozzuto is the property manager for The Hartley apartments. CBG was the general contractor for the parking garage.