This past year saw a lot of construction activity and rezoning cases hoping to get to the point of starting construction. The hot spot for this activity was focused on a central portion of Tysons where two Fortune 500 mega-companies — Booz Allen Hamilton and SAIC — employ thousands.
While the Boro has grabbed all of the attention given its sheer size and pre-leasing agreements with Whole Foods, but near by Dittmar has plans to redevelop the now abandoned Best Western, and across the street Beacon Capital Partners has high-rise ambitions of their own at Greensboro Park Place.
Greensboro Park Place was approved in early 2014 during a period when very few post-comprehensive plan projects were moving forward with construction, holding off to see how well the early towers would do commercially. The project had some early renderings included with the rezoning approval that showed the intent for the public park space and scale of the development.
New renderings from WDG Architecture have developed the buildings further and provided more details on the proposed public park.
The two residential apartment towers, 20-stories and 24-stories, will include 480 units and will include 2,000 square feet of ground floor retail and a significant portion of public use space which will be leased to Fairfax County at $1 per month for the next 30 years, helping to provide day care, public education, and other flex needs for the County.
I really like the look of the building, it masks the mechanical spaces well, it has done a good job of creating a pleasant ground level, and the park layout is both attractive and functional for those walking between these buildings or International Drive, and the metro, providing a more direct path to the intersection of Solutions Drive. The curvature of the building really works well with the parcels geometry, much better than having the building sit back artificially and creating a void space from the street.
No word on whether Capital Beacon has plans to begin construction this year, but if the Boro is successful in transforming this central region of Tysons, Greensboro Park Place will be soon to follow.
