S T A C K
St. Elizabeth's is located in the Anacostia community in southeast Washington DC on a hill overlooking the Anacostia River with panoramic views of Washington and Virginia. The campus plays an important role as a headquarters for a number of Federal institutions.
Program | 620k |
Date | 2026 |
Program | Workplace, Historic campus |
Stacking
To alleviate the large scale of the building within a campus of smaller buildings, "stacking" related programming dematerialized it's square footage into modules. The overlapping program modules provided opportunities for entry points, terracing, courtyards and optimizing the depth of workplace floor plates. Each module is 96' wide which allowed the interior programming to meet Federal workplace standards, provide clear circulation and efficient cores.
Ravine
The topography within St. Elisabeth's campus varies from sloped grassy meadows, dense woodlands, and open plateaus of manicured lawns. The CISA buildings is situated within a transition space among all three of these landscape typologies.
As a way to stabilize sloped topography of the ravine, the new building acts as a retaining wall and opportunity to bridge the upper plateau landscape with the lower ravine adjacent to the stacks. These emblematic vertical stacks were part of the original campus infrastructure of St. Elisabeth's campus.
Materialize
We chose to pursue terracotta as a modern interpretation of masonry units. We also integrated schist stone as a base similar to existing building and retaining walls on campus. The finned curtainwalls yet not historic were introduced as light filtering elements to mitigate heat gain and diminish the scale of large curtainwall openings.
