The Corner Village at Warren

Chosen for the design of the site and the buildings. Our office was selected as the building architects and retained as the site planners for the design of the property. As this was the last remaining piece of undeveloped land in the central business district and an extremely high visibility site, the design and placement of the building(s) as well as the site design would absolutely reshape the center of the town.

The zoning ordinance established the maximum permitted building size of 36,000 square feet. Performing several different site studies and spending much time observing the property and the vehicular and pedestrian traffic patterns, we decided on a design with (2) buildings. The property shape is triangular with each of two legs fronting on a main street, one being curved. The third side shares its boundary with a large retail shopping center. As each of the three sides is highly visible, our design philosophy was that there would not be any “back” or “rear” to the buildings, rather each building elevation should be treated as a “front”. We set one building close to the major intersection of town and designed it as a two-story structure providing the opportunity to design a signature or landmark building at the main corner of town. Parking was placed away from the corner to reduce the visibility of automobiles from the street intersections. The 2 building concept allowed us to distribute the parking areas around the buildings while including landscaped islands and wide sidewalks for the patrons.

There are several office buildings located adjacent to, and across the street from the site. We had observed employees from these buildings typically take walks during their lunch hour. The local ordinance required that a 4’ wide sidewalk be included in our site design and, rather than include this immediately next to the streets, we included a meandering wider sidewalk bordered by flowering shrubs to encourage pedestrian use. We located it away from vehicular traffic closer to the buildings to provide the ability to “window shop” and we designed each street face of both buildings to have store front windows where pedestrians and vehicles could see into the buildings. The 2-story building was designed with a “turret” feature facing the intersection with its second floor tentatively designed/envisioned as a restaurant with large windows and an exterior balcony also facing the streets. The concept was to have this inside space illuminated at night and allow a restaurant tenant to provide outdoor balcony seating.

The construction of the buildings is a steel skeleton frame, with open web steel bar joists and metal decking for floor and roof construction. Various exterior materials were used including brick, stone, stucco and siding to break up the massing of the building and to create an atmosphere of old world European flare. Large arched overhangs provide weather protection for many of the storefronts. Several architectural features such as the “turret” and other high windowed spaces were structurally designed to provide the tenants with higher ceiling areas.

Our office acted not only as the architect for, but contributed to the design of, and coordinated all other design professionals on this project (structural, mechanical, civil, and landscape architecture).