UDC will fix dead plaza with student center

The University of the District of Columbia wants to build a student center on what’s now an empty plaza creating a hole in the Connecticut Avenue streetscape right at the Van Ness Metro station. An active building here would be a big improvement over dead space.

The plan calls for landscaping and some cafe seating along the Connecticut Avenue frontage. The building will also have a green roof as well as a rain garden between it and the existing buildings. The remaining plaza area will also get a small lawn as well as some other landscaping. Here’s the new building: The design happens to look quite a bit like DC’s new libraries, for better or worse: These new libraries have gotten some architectural praise, and since both are institutions devoted to learning, it makes some sense for UDC to look somewhat library-like. Certainly this is far better than the concrete bunker architecture of the buildings behind it. On the other hand, this still seems a bit boring. It would be nice for the building to have a more defined top. and the current urban design thinking discourages arcades along the ground floor like this building appears to have. What do you think? Update: several commenters pointed out that the ground floor doesn’t have an arcade, just a “structural reveal” where the ground floor has visibility into the structure.