Community feedback prompts updates to Amazon’s HQ2 second phase

Dive Brief:

• Amazon has unveiled an up-to-date site and constructing system for stage two of its next headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, also known as the PenPlace section. 
• The web-site additions involve guarded bike lanes about and during the internet site as properly as a 15-foot-large immediate path by way of the central courtyard for pedestrians cyclists and scooters. Other variations include things like new topography in the central environmentally friendly location and rooftop photo voltaic panels and new massing and exteriors for some of the buildings.
• The county is soliciting general public suggestions on the web page plan proposal by means of Nov. 7.

Dive Insight:

The size and scope of the Amazon HQ2 venture has grown substantially given that its first announcement. In February 2020, Amazon documented that its new campus in Arlington, Virginia would contain 4 million sq. toes of workplace space, like 2.1 million square ft at the initially period, Metropolitan Park, which is presently beneath building and established to be comprehensive in 2023. The PenPlace program submitted by JBG Smith and Acorn LLC in February 2021 called for 2.8 million sq. ft, for a full of 4.9 million square ft of new Amazon business space.

The latest modifications stem from a collection of conferences with Arlington County’s Extended Vary Planning Committee. City officials and local community customers expressed a need for devoted bicycle lanes on all 4 sides of the web site, as very well as increased topographical variation and a wider range of environmentally friendly plantings. The original, circuitous route structure through the central eco-friendly prompted requests for a direct east/west thoroughfare that would join the website to the local community and accommodate bikes, pedestrians and scooters.

The three 22-story offices’ new exteriors handle phone calls for higher layout range and differentiation concerning developing sections. These alterations to structures known as T1, T2 and T3, which includes new massing and facades, have lowered PenPlace’s workplace house from 2.8 million to 2.7 million square ft, according to Amazon spokesperson Allison Flicker, bringing the new whole down to 4.8 million sq. ft of workplace house.

Strategies for the Helix — a spiral-shaped, 350-foot glass amenity structure — continue being unchanged from previous layouts, apart from the addition of a mid-block stairway in the vicinity of the building’s foundation at the north end of the site.

The development of Amazon’s second headquarters has prompted more than $4 billion in transit and infrastructure projects in Northern Virginia, to be constructed in excess of the future decade. These involve a new Metro station at Potomac Yard, to open in 2022, and a pedestrian bridge from Crystal City to Ronald Reagan National Airport, to open up in 2028.

Next the public remark time period, the Web page Prepare Evaluate Committee will meet up with on December 6 to talk about the task, with an supplemental meeting to be held in early 2022, in accordance to Arlington County spokesperson Elise Cleva. The Planning Commission and County Board hearings on PenPlace are anticipated in spring 2022.