Inside the Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue at Sixth Street Northwest, the electronic news ticker is working on a wall of the 90-foot-tall atrium. A three-story guard tower from the Berlin Wall has been installed in a corner gallery. At the back of the exhibition spaces, the 535-seat Annenberg Theater is completed and awaiting an audience.
However, as revealed on a building tour last week, most of the spaces in this museum of news remain unfinished because of delays in the delivery of steel, copper and other building materials. The setback, according to deputy director Max Page, has pushed the opening date from mid-October to the first quarter of 2008.
Though the public will have to wait to visit the exhibits, the private portion of the museum is up and running. A dozen of the 135 apartments in the Newseum Residences at the rear of the building along C Street Northwest have been rented.
This attached, but functionally independent wing takes up 143,000 square feet of the 643,000-square-foot building complex. The inclusion of housing, along with commercial space, was mandated by the District government as part of the agreement with the museum to develop the site.
This mixed-use concept is one of the Newseum’s best aspects. Round-the-clock activities will benefit the neighborhood in extending the existing urban vitality the Penn Quarter and further cement the connection between Washington’s downtown and its monumental core.
James Stewart Polshek and Robert Young of New York-based Polshek Partnership Architects designed the 12-story residential wing to extend the clean-lined, modernist architecture of their museum, so much so that its domestic character is negligible. “We were loyal to the palette of materials but developed a series of units that is quite different from the museum” on Pennsylvania Avenue, Mr. Polshek says. “This side of the building reflects the urban grid of the Penn Quarter neighborhood. Like all housing, there is a certain generic aspect to it.”
So generic that this monochromatic, silvery metal-and-glass facade could pass for a 1960s hotel or office building. Where the Pennsylvania Avenue facade, nearly completed, is sculptural and monumental, this residential side of the building is flat and bland. Slightly projecting from the base of the windows are perforated aluminum panels that at first glance look like air-conditioning units. They turn out to be the ends of narrow balconies reached from sliding glass doors in the apartments.
The nine-story residential block rises from a two-story glass-and-metal base housing the entrance to the Annenberg Theater on C Street and a commercial space at the corner of Sixth Street. Between the two is a terrace where the concrete piers of the structure are visible. (Being made of concrete rather than the delayed steel allowed this wing to be constructed first.)
Most of this storefront is being turned into Source, a restaurant to be run by chef Wolfgang Puck. It’s scheduled to open Oct. 8, according to a Newseum spokeswoman. The restaurant’s interiors are being outfitted by the Engstrom Design Group, a San Rafael, Calif., firm responsible for the arts-and-crafts-style Finn & Porter eatery in Alexandria.
The entrance to the apartments is tucked into the storefront’s Sixth Street side under concrete balconies with metal railings that extend the 1960s feeling of the C Street facade. The projecting balconies aren’t elegant, but they do provide some of the few areas where the residents and museum connect. Visible from their concrete platforms are Pennsylvania Avenue and the National Gallery of Art’s marble portico at the end of Sixth Street.
Residents also will be able to see into the Newseum galleries, housed in an adjacent glass-enclosed bay shaded by horizontal fins, on the museum side of the building.
Inside the apartment block, a handsome lobby designed by Meditch Murphey Architects of Chevy Chase, Md., plays off the museum’s modernism. Its major design element is a luxe wall of veined onyx screening the reception area from residents’ mailboxes.
On the floor above the lobby, the onyx wall is repeated in a television lounge and business center for the residents, where it shields a kitchenette from seating and dining areas. At night, the translucent stone walls appear through the glass facade as a continuous, glowing surface unifying the two levels.
“It’s a night light for people finding their way home,” says architect John Murphey, who admits his inspiration came from the 1929 Barcelona Pavilion, designed by German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Forgoing the obvious choice of Barcelona chairs, he furnished the spaces with curving contemporary sofas upholstered in green leather.
Mr. Murphey’s biggest challenge was enlivening the dark, nearly city-block-long corridors stretching across the upper floors. His clever solution was to cast light across the hallway and place angular strips of yellow carpeting in front of the apartments to create “the illusion that someone just opened the door and light was streaming out.” Linoleum wainscoting and bright spotlights resembling doorbells also help break up the apparent length.
The apartments, ranging from 440-square-foot studios to 1,333-square-foot two-bedroom units, are efficiently designed by Philip Esocoff and Associates, a District firm responsible for some of the better condominium buildings in the Penn Quarter.
Most face the backs of the courthouses across C Street, but a few end units offer views of the Capitol — and the rooftop mechanical equipment for the museum. Managed by the Bozzuto Group, they rent for $1,720 to $6,500 a month and require a $700 monthly “amenity fee” for use of the second-floor business center, lounge and rooftop terrace.
Income from the Newseum Residences “first will be used to defray costs of operating the apartment building,” Newseum spokeswoman Susan Bennett says by e-mail. “Any net profit will go into the general coffers of the Newseum.”
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