The one-story structure that houses a 7-Eleven convenience store at 211 W. 28th Street in Remington would be replaced by a six-story apartment building that’s all the colors of the rainbow, under a design proposal unveiled this month.
The development site is a triangular parcel bounded by 28th Street, Remington Avenue and Cresmont Avenue. The developers are Seawall and Charm City Buyers. Seawall, which owns the land and leases it to 7-Eleven, has given notice that it plans to replace the building that contains the convenience store with a mixed-use development after the store’s lease expires around the end of this year. According to Katie Marshall, director of communications, Seawall is committed to bringing 7-Eleven back as a tenant of the new building. The architect for the project is PI.KL Studio and the landscape architect is Floura Teeter.
Preliminary plans for the proposed building were presented to the Land Use Committee of the Greater Remington Improvement Association (GRIA) on June 5 and to the Baltimore Planning Department’s Urban Design and Architecture Advisory Panel (UDAAP) on June 13.
At both meetings, project manager Matt Pinto of Seawall and architect Pavlina Ilieva of PI.KL outlined plans for a structure containing two commercial spaces and a lobby on the first level and 60 apartments spread over five levels above, with a parklike-community space called The Plaza at the south end of the parcel, where the community’s “R” sculpture stands.
Pinto said at the GRIA meeting that the development team is attempting to create a building that is “fun and playful” and “very much an interesting riff off of the much more serious Remington Row building,” a five-story, 108-unit development that stands across the street from the convenience store at 2700 Remington Avenue. He told the UDAAP members that Remington Avenue is to Remington what 36th Street is to Hampden: “We’re very excited to be able to take the site and put it to what we think is the highest and best use.”
Ilieva told the UDAAP panel that the design team wants to create a structure that would be a relatively simple volume yet reflect the energy and creativity of Remington, a neighborhood that has gained several new developments in recent years. She called it a “small but mighty project” for the community.
Ilieva told the GRIA members that the 28th Street façade would have a “rhythmic row of windows” that echoes the regularity of the windows at Remington Row, “although not quite the warehouse ones, a little bit more modern.”
In the proposed design, she said, the side facing the plaza “starts to become more playful, with balconies and other pieces kind of moving along the facade, and we’re considering introducing color to this so that it starts to activate the façade…All along the way, we’ve…been looking at a lot of color in the project.”
Ilieva said her team thought it was appropriate to introduce color because the triangular parcel is a “very special site” with the potential to include an active plaza.
“We always thought that some portion of the building [could] use the energy and excitement that color could bring,” she said at the GRIA meeting. Around the country, “there’s a lot of examples of exciting urban projects like that and, quite frankly, something that Baltimore doesn’t really have.”
More specifically, the design team thought that the corner of 28th and Remington “could be a really great opportunity for a bolder expression, whether it’s a mural or some other design element,” Ilieva said. “It can start to speak to some of the other murals that are in the neighborhood, like at R House and the adjacent B.Willow [plant boutique]…We want both [the building and the plaza] to be playful. We want both of them to be kind of like a breath of fresh air — something unexpected in the neighborhood, a place that would draw everyone.”
Giving the building a “more colorful identity” will help make it more of a destination – “an epicenter for the neighborhood,” Ilieva said at the UDAAP meeting. “We think it’s special and different because it has a plaza” and for that reason alone “could take on this larger presence and speak a slightly different language than all the other buildings around.”
Introducing color is also a good way to contrast the new building with Remington Row while reflecting the neighborhood’s eclecticism and diversity, Pinto said at the GRIA meeting.
“If Remington Row went to law school,” he said, “we’re trying to make it feel as though the 7-Eleven building went to art school – you know, as sort of a playful contrast to the seriousness of the heavy, sort of brick and classic architecture there…That’s what we’re trying to figure out, how to do that tastefully and in a way that really speaks well to everything else that’s in the neighborhood.”
Genesis of the design
While the designers started out by exploring the idea of adding color in selective locations, Ilieva said, they grew more excited about the concept and thought about adding colors to every side of the building.
“We started with some very simple massing, kind of very neutral palette,” she said during the GRIA meeting. “We slowly started introducing color and looking at it and really, in our last iteration, everyone around us was getting more and more excited: Should it be yellow? Should it be green? Should it be blue? Should it happen just at the corners? Should it be at the frames? Some people were thinking that [a blue wall] would be good. Others were thinking yellow. There was a lot of excitement getting generated about what this could be. We tried quite a few different versions…and an idea emerged: What if it’s all the colors? What if this building embodies the multiplicity and the diversity and the excitement and the energy and the buzz of the neighborhood? What if, in its essence, it is all the colors — the spectrum of light?”
As the design process evolved, “it quickly took us to this idea of: why limit ourselves to just one color, be it green or yellow or blue?” Ilieva said at the UDAAP meeting. “Why don’t we explore the multiplicity of the light spectrum and introduce all of them in a way that really celebrates the vibrancy and diversity and excitement of the neighborhood, but in a way that’s really tasteful and strategic and really starts to have a strong concept within the building?…How can we really embrace that energy of the neighborhood, that idea that this is an eclectic, colorful, vibrant, fun place to live, and use the building to really continue to energize the plaza as well?”
But not wanting to pursue a design approach that’s too obvious or cliché, Ilieva said, the design team is exploring ways to give different sides of the building different colors, so the full spectrum would only become apparent as one moves around the building.
In their studies, “we apply [colors] in the building in a way that it’s not a rainbow that you see at all times, but rather different fragments of the spectrum of light appear at different portions of the building,” she explained at the GRIA meeting. The “rainbow of colors” runs through the four facades of the building, but “when you fold them back into a building, you only start to see certain spectrums of light emerge from the corners” on any given façade.
The result is “a very 360 building,” she said. “Depending on which direction you approach it from, you see a different side and a different kind of coloration and a different articulation, so it doesn’t have the sameness and ubiquity that you see throughout the city. I think it’s also a direct response to some of the comments that the project team has been hearing from the neighborhood: Let’s think of something bolder, more interesting. Something that isn’t the same dark-clad building that we see a lot.”
Ilieva acknowledged that there are reasons to have dark-colored buildings in certain locations, such as the need to fit in with a certain architectural context. “But in the context of Remington, there’s just so much vibrancy and so much eclectic quality of the architecture,” she said. “There’s the seriousness of Remington Row that they keep mentioning. So we’re really excited for this building to have its own expression, its own language, and really create a new destination within the neighborhood.”
Color can be incorporated in a variety of ways, not just with murals, Ilieva said.
“We’re studying this right now – rather than it just being painted on the building, it is something that is part of the building,” she said. The studies involve “explorations of how that concept of that radiant of color that changes as you move around the building can actually be embedded into the architecture of the building…It’s not necessarily an oversized mural. It’s rather color coming through the architecture of the building.”
Various materials can be used on the exterior to further express the neighborhood’s diversity, she said.
“Not only is it about color, but it’s also about textures,” she said. “The balconies have these perforated panels that can also be layered on the façade, colorful glazed brick that also layers in different colors. So from afar it sort of looks like the color is the primary interest here, but as you get closer to the building the textures of the different materials start to emerge.”
Pros and cons
With an estimated cost of $19.3 million, the building will contain studios and one- and two-bedroom apartments. The areas for move-ins and trash collection will be on the side facing Cresmont Avenue, which the development team is proposing to make one-way southbound. The building won’t have any parking spaces, but parking will be available in the garage at Remington Row one block to the west. Leasing will be handled out of Remington Row as well. The team is not seeking any zoning variances for this project, Pinto said.
The idea of introducing a range of colors drew mostly favorable comments, but one community member expressed reservations.
At the GRIA meeting, Remington resident Bill Cunningham said he thought the 7-Eleven parcel was the wrong location for a multi-color approach.
“My reaction is: wrong building, wrong colors, wrong place,” he told the development team. “As you look at that area, and many of you live there, it doesn’t fit. It would be great down on your new project on Sisson Street, but it just doesn’t fit there. The colors would do much better being in that plaza that you’re going to do [as part of the Sisson Street project.] Please don’t dump that thing” on Remington Avenue.
In the UDAAP meeting, review panel member Osborne Anthony said he thought the side of the building that faces the plaza could be “way more playful and a lot more organic,” since it will be a backdrop to the park setting. Panel member Kevin Storm suggested the architects might want to explore more subtle ways to add color to their building. He mentioned a building dubbed ‘Liz’ in the 1700 block of 14th Street N. W. in Washington D. C., constructed for Whitman-Walker Health and named after donor Elizabeth Taylor. He also inquired about the roof of the Remington building, asking if it will be a “green” roof.
For the Whitman-Walker building, architect Annabelle Selldorf introduced colors in the frames of upper-level windows. There are 12 colors in all, and they’re created by a process of glazing the terra cotta window surrounds with a succession of hues, like a color wheel, working their way around the building. The colors can be seen as a reference to the rainbow flag and are also an effective way to animate the facades.
With the Washington building, “you eventually figure out that you’re looking at this rainbow, but it takes you a while to move around and it’s a little bit more subtle,” Storm said.
“I’ve always enjoyed working with terra cotta, so we came up with this color scheme that would go around the windows,” Selldorf said in a phone interview. “It gives the building a kind of lively and friendly and welcoming appearance. The idea is that the colors would graduate into one another and no two colors would not harmonize with one another.”
Ghost Rivers
At the UDAAP meeting, plans for the 13,000-square-foot plaza received an enthusiastic response. Review panel member Sharon Bradley called the entire project a “celebratory” design that captures “the vibrancy and the energy of the Remington neighborhood.”
Landscape architect Zolna Russell of Floura Teeter said she is working to create a space that builds on a work of public art that already touches on the 7-Eleven site.
The project is Ghost Rivers, artist Bruce Willen’s 1.5 mile-long permanent public art installation and history walk in which he visualizes a lost stream that’s buried below the streets of Baltimore. Created starting in 2020, Willen’s project reveals the hidden history and path of a buried stream called Sumwalt Run, which now flows entirely through underground culverts beneath Remington and Charles Village, including the 7-Eleven site on 28th Street. Through a series of installations, wayfinding markers and writings, Ghost Rivers brings the lost landscapes and histories to the surface. Along the way, it draws connections between Baltimore’s watershed, its social history and the evolving relationships between natural and human environments.
“We’re fortunate in that we have a recent art installation by artist Bruce Willen that actually draws attention to the fact that not only Sumwalt Run but many other streams are flowing even today in our storm drains below our city fabric,” Russell told the UDAAP members.
Thanks to Willen, “there is a blue line painted currently on the street in the public right of way, and it runs directly through our site and all through Remington, and that is really what we’re building the theme of the plaza around,” she said.
Russell said Floura Teeter wants to build on Willen’s project by introducing trees, plants, embedded boulders, logs and other elements that will bring “an extra touch of nature” to what is now a convenience store parking lot.
“The central feature of this plaza is the Ghost River,” she said. “We are connecting to the lines on either side of the plaza and celebrating that Ghost River and kind of creating a mini-forested stream valley. We want the stream valley to feel like it’s a little respite from urban life.”
Other proposed elements include manually-operated water jets; a climbing structure and other play features for kids; a bike rack; tables with umbrellas; movable seating; bird houses;Mason Bee houses; a dog walk; educational panels focused on Sumwalt Run and the area’s ecology, and a kiosk, possibly for a snowball stand or some other “casual food and beverage opportunity.”
While Remington Row celebrates the mining history of Remington, and R House celebrates the manufacturing and industrial history of Remington, “this project is really giving us an opportunity to celebrate the natural history of Remington,” Russell said. “We are really kind of playing on Sumwalt Run and the Ghost Rivers but also celebrating nature within this potential community space.”
Another goal is to create a family-friendly space that can be used in a variety of ways.
“This plaza is really intended to support a lot of casual family community use as well as being flexible enough to support events or other activities that the community might want to have,” she said. “We’re really thinking a lot about making it very friendly for children, for people with dogs, people who just want to come and hang out for a couple hours in the evening… We want this to be a very lively, engaging, colorful space.”
The R sculpture will be retained as well, she said. “The R is really an important landmark for Remington and sort of the symbol of the community, which is really a wonderful group of active, committed, artistic, funky people, and we really want this plaza to celebrate the spirit of the community as well as its natural history,” she said.
“While the building’s going to be cool, the outdoor space…is really great,” Pinto said. “It really provides an outdoor space that we’re missing in that central corridor right there. It will be a great place for people to hang for guests, residents, whoever it might be that wants to come and check out what we have going on here.”
Work in progress
Ilieva and Pinto said the design is still a work in progress. As much as anything, the team is looking to create the building and the plaza as one seamless project, Ilieva said at the UDAAP meeting.
“It’s really important that what we put there takes it to the next level but it also feels like it’s one piece, so that the plaza enhances the building and the building helps define the plaza,” she said.
Everyone on the design team is excited about how it can turn out, she told the GRIA members.
”We think this could be very special, very Remington, very unique to Baltimore.”
Editor’s note: The article has been updated to clarify that Seawall is committed to bringing 7-Eleven back as a tenant of the new building.
I’m not against developing Remington, and I don’t bemoan progress, but the hyperbole from the architect is laughable. It’s a boring box. With paint. Unless I’m missing something here? That color scheme will be as fresh as an avocado kitchen appliance in 5-10 years. Put 10 more of them up, fill them all with boring people and rename the place DC. Personally, I prefer the utility of 7-11 over the promise of faux vitality. Unless those apartments are permanent affordable housing, in which case you can paint them any color you please.