Reuse, don’t demolish, Rosslyn’s Key Bridge Marriott

It’s an esoteric list, my favorite buildings in Arlington. I could never put a firm ranking on it, and the contents change with the seasons or with my moods. The Cherrydale branch of the library. The affordable homes built into the Baptist Church at Clarendon. Missionhurst is stunningly beautiful, even if the building’s history is stunningly racist. Maybe I’d even name ‘Our Lady of the Gas Pump.’ I could go on and on. But there’s one building that will always hover at the top of the list. It’s a landmark, it’s a memorial of a bygone age and an ever-modern sign of hope for a better future. It’s the gateway to the county. It’s been an icon to anyone traveling to and from Georgetown for more than two generations. And it’s about to be ruthlessly razed by the County’s own hand. I’m talking, of course, about the Key Bridge Marriott.

It was the second hotel ever opened by what’s now a global chain, only 36 years after the first travelers crossed Key Bridge. In 1959, the 600-room hotel must have been an awesome sight, rising from the south bank of the Potomac long before today’s glass-clad towers. I can only imagine the feelings it might have stirred. It welcomed you across the river into Virginia, into what must have seemed a shining new frontier (at least for Washington’s white population), within living memory of the violence of “Dead Man’s Hollow.” Or it welcomed you to DC from points south, whether you were visiting to lobby your senator or whether you’d come to glimpse the nation’s capital, cherry blossoms, and museums. One of its stories, the clandestine parking lot handoff of $350,000 of Nixon’s dark cash, is famous. How many more are untold?

But the building’s recent history is short and sad. In 2018, some faceless Los Angeles investors bought it. In 2021, they said they’d add two new towers next to the building. Then they closed the hotel. Then they vanished. Squatters moved in. In 2023, Arlington P.D. evicted them and the County condemned the building. Last month, Arlington ordered the owners to raze what is now considered a “public nuisance,” and has threatened to carry out the job if they won’t.

Twenty years ago, this wouldn’t have been quite such a big deal. Twenty years ago, Rosslyn was lousy with gray-brown exposed concrete high-rises. That’s no longer true. Today, it feels like Rosslyn is nothing but mile-high glass and steel.

Many of those buildings deserved to go. They were cheap, un-architectural and anti-urbanist. Arlington is served far better by The Highlands, a residential tower-plus-fire-station, than by the bland office mid-rise that it replaced.

But not all the old buildings were bad. A handful are — were — bona fide examples of the aesthetic pinnacle of high-modernist architecture, especially brutalism. This genre is named not for any sense of brutality but for its French pioneers’ pride in their use of raw concrete, béton brut. And why were the French proud of their raw concrete? For its social meaning. Concrete was an affordable material, much more affordable in the postwar period than masonry or steel. And so it could be used by builders to house the most people at the lowest public expense. Boston City Hall (1968) was a powerful statement of social commitment: the mayor would sit in a building of the same material used for housing projects.

(I don’t mean to say that modernist architecture doesn’t have a troubled legacy. It’s earned its association with the worst kind of inhumane Pruitt-And-Igoe housing projects. But the violent failure of such modernist dreams isn’t the fault of the idealistic architects who designed buildings: it’s the fault of anti-urbanist layout and paternalistic planners.)

Modernist architecture has an especially illustrious history in Greater Washington, in incarnations from our Metro stations to the HUD building to the Hirshhorn. And the people love it. The National Building Museum just this week opened an exhibit dedicated to our city’s excellence in exposed concrete. You might have seen hip young artsy types sipping espresso in WMATA’s ‘Brutiful’ t-shirt. As with any artistic style, it’s coming out of the awkward period a generation after its heyday and entering a retro revival.

Arlington missed the memo. The Key Bridge Marriott isn’t exactly brutalism – it’s made of brick, not exposed concrete – but it’s the closest darn thing Rosslyn has left. The Marriott’s exuberant geometry, its friendly balconies, its boldly-cantilevered top floor, its honestness to its materials, all speak of the same spirit. When we lost the RCA building last year (glorious brutalism if ever there were), I could tell myself “at least the Marriott is still standing.” When the Marriott falls, not much will remain.

There’s a final argument for saving the Marriott, an argument from the future instead of the past: embodied carbon. New construction is fabulously emissions-intensive. Unnecessarily tearing down a building – especially when the building already contains, essentially, 600 housing units – is nothing short of climate insanity. Treehugger reports that “The best way to avoid embodied carbon emissions right now, when our carbon budget is shrinking fast, is to conserve and reuse as many existing buildings as possible.” For Arlington to tear down the Marriott isn’t just a crime against Arlington’s own history, but violence against our entire planet’s future.

Of course, we shouldn’t preserve the hotel in amber. As Amanda Kolson Hurley writes of WMATA’s Metro stations, “[p]erhaps we can save brutalism by making it more lovable.” We should retrofit it, turning it into much-needed housing stock, and build those new towers next door. There was nothing wrong with the 2019 proposal to build on the site. It was approved by the County Board in March of 2020. The only problem was with the LA-based investment corporation, which went belly-up the same year, another victim of the coronavirus – or perhaps another victim of SoCal speculation run amok.

To demolish the building would be a massive waste of resources for Arlington’s economy. County Manager Mark Schwartz should immediately issue an order to halt the demolition process, and the County should seek a developer to take over the project including the rehabilitation of the original tower and new construction on the rest of the land. This could follow the plan approved in 2020, or (more likely), an updated version, with less parking and more affordable units. This is land that should be utilized to the fullest, with Potomac views and an eight-minute walk to three Metro lines.

The county would have its pick of developers for a spot in the prime-est of prime locations. It could hand the development to whoever offers the best deal to the public - perhaps a nonprofit developer such as the Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing, an organization which (unlike the previous owner) has proven their ability to deliver large projects in Rosslyn even during a pandemic. (Disclosure: Elise Panko, a GGWash board member, works at the Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing.)

New towers could take any number of forms, but will likely be much taller than the Marriott building. They should enter into an architectural conversation with it, extending its lines or echoing its materials, unifying the entire development and honoring Arlington’s past.

As for the old building itself, it will need a thorough retrofit, with new elevators, new windows, new appliances, and a likely conversion to residential. Retrofitting the building to turn it into housing could prove costly, but the county has the opportunity to save enormously on these costs by making any necessary exceptions to the building code to permit the adaptation of these hotel rooms directly into apartments without blueprint modifications. With some flexibility on the part of authorities, it will be much cheaper to retrofit the building than to build a new one – savings which will be passed onto residents in one of the region’s most unattainable jurisdictions.

Writers from Jane Jacobs to Kevin Lynch to Richard Sennett have shown how the spirit, as well as the economy, of a city relies on having a mix of buildings of different ages, new as well as old. That’s no less true of a downtown district like Rosslyn than it is true of Jacobs’ Greenwich Village. It will be less expensive, less disruptive, and more sustainable for us to retrofit the building than demolish it. Why should we let incompetent Californian speculators make us tear down one of the county’s most beautiful – and still useful – buildings?