Story

The Inspīr Embassy Row project consisted of the renovation of an historic hotel on DuPont Circle to transform it into a luxury senior living center. The original building consisted of eight stories above ground and a three-story basement. The entire building interior was gutted to create 174 new apartments. Special amenities include a pool, sauna, steam room, salt room, fitness center, three bars, multiple balconies, a movie room, beauty salon, coffee room, art room, and library. A full state-of-the-art kitchen was built to serve residents first class meals in the new dining room and garden bistro. Four new elevators were installed, requiring modifications to the existing shaftways. Additional structural steel was added throughout the building to allow for the demolition of existing concrete slabs to create new two-story open spaces in the lobby, gathering room and pool. A new structural slab was constructed over the existing roof deck to allow for the addition of a new penthouse lounge, bar, and a green roof. This required extensive coordination to assure that bearing points of the new slab aligned with the reinforced building columns on the floor below. One of the greatest challenges was coordination of the mechanical, electrical, and fire protection work. Because we were working within the confines of the existing structure, there was great difficulty maintaining desired finish ceiling heights while running duct, pipe, and conduit around existing columns and beams. A unique challenge was that the existing building actually consisted of two building: a 1920s building where the floors were built from terra cotta block set in a grid of narrow concrete ribs, and a 1980s building that was a standard reinforced concrete structure. Providing MEP to 174 apartments in addition to the amenities spaces, required core drilling over 1,000 holes thru the existing structural slabs. In the 1920s building, we were not able to cut thru any of the concrete ribs because this would compromise the structure of the slab; all MEP penetrations had to fall within an existing 12” x 12” terra cotta block. After completing BIM coordination for a space, the resulting vertical floor penetrations had to be laid out in the field and the floor scanned to see how the penetrations aligned with the terra cotta block. If a penetration hit a concrete rib, which occurred often, then the penetration would have to be analyzed with the architect to determine how it could be moved to fall within the terra cotta block without impacting the design of that particular apartment. In addition to the interior, there was extensive exterior façade work. Every window in the building was replaced, with over 700 windows in total. The entire brick façade of the building was re-pointed, cast stone patched, and lintels repainted; an enclosed scaffold system was installed along the Massachusetts Ave elevation of the building to allow us to work during the 2023-2024 winter.