CHIA MIN  WANG 

The city of Washington DC has an extraordinary contrasting relationship between the city grids and nature edges. The city has characterized by L’Enfant’s urban Plan of Washington DC, the diagonals superimposed Thomas Jefferson’s historical orthogonal grids surrounded by the hard rock of the Piedmont Plateau and the Potomac River.  

 

The Wharf: Parcel 8 consists of 255 residences and a hotel, both with ground-floor retail located on the south of Potomac riverbank. For the architecture approach, the U-shape building provide stacking up terraces in the residential wing and rotate window bay orientation in the Hotel wing to maximize panoramic river view,

 

In residential amenities such as the lobby, GYM, and clubhouse, the design intent is to associate this relevancy in the historical urban grid and bounding nature. To develop two different dichotomies between hard (structure) versus soft (natural) materials those are to interpret the relationship between urban structure and natural environment in Washington DC.