Dive Brief:
- Tishman Speyer and REX Architecture PC have teamed up to build a 370,000-square-foot glass "kaleidoscope" office building in Washington, DC, the Washington Business Journal reported.
- The building’s exterior will be sheathed in approximately 900 concave glass panels, which will provide an obstacle-free view from the inside and a shape-shifting quality to the building’s exterior.
- CBS News occupies the building currently on one part of the two-parcel site, but Tishman Speyer will build the news agency a new 44,000-square-foot news bureau — to be completed by February 2018 — before starting construction on this building, which will be built "atop and next to" the CBS component.
Dive Insight:
After accounting for CBS' space, Tishman Speyer's portion of the building will have approximately 313,000 square feet of rentable space, according to the Business Journal reported. The building will also include 9,000 square feet of retail and a set-aside of 24,000 square feet for the previous tenant of the second parcel.
Tishman Speyer said it is confident that there will be a market for the more than 300,000 square feet of speculative "trophy" space when construction is complete. James G. Davis Construction will serve as the general contractor on the project.
The National Real Estate Investor reported this week that strong demand for office space has resulted in only minor speculative building, in response to relatively low office rents as compared with high construction costs. In addition, "construction is catching up to demand" in hot markets like New York City and San Francisco, which has resulted in somewhat of a slowdown in the demand for new office space.
Tishman Speyer is well known as a developer of two high-rise projects at New York's mixed-use development Hudson Yards. One building is a 1.3 million square foot tower and the other, The Spiral, designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, features landscaped terraces winding their way around the building's exterior.