Post #329: MAC-related meetings this week: Marco Polo/Vienna Market

Posted on July 29, 2019

There is only one public meeting this week relevant to MAC zoning.

Friday, 8/2/2019, at 8 AM (yes, AM) in Town Hall, the Board of Architectural Review will hold a work session to examine revised plans for the Vienna Market/Marco Polo development.

The meeting materials for this work session are located here:
https://vienna-va.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=4073485&GUID=4FEE28BF-51F1-4DED-9053-000950DF0218&Options=&Search=

For background, see Post #326.

Below is a time series of the Church Street side of the building, where I have crudely removed the background.  The top is the original concept plan as approved by the BAR.  The middle one is the “plain vanilla” generic-NoVA town houses for what I termed the “bait and switch” (Post #245).  The third is what was presented to the Bar on 6/14/2019 (Post #296).  The very last one is what will be presented to the BAR this Friday 8/2/2019.

At this level of detail, the only changes for this last set of drawings, for the Church Street view, are the following:

  1. The rusticated (roughened) brick portions (the lighter-colored brick) now go halfway up the first and third buildings.
  2. A horizontal decorative element ( ledge? molding?) was removed from the walls of the first and second buildings.

 

What you really can’t see well from any of the drawings is that alleyways lined with garage doors will be visible, from Church Street, between the 1st and 2nd buildings, and between the 3rd and 4th buildings.  I.e., beneath the bay windows that face each on the 1st and 2nd buildings, there are garage doors.  And the ground level is taken up with garage doors down the entire length of the building.  That’s a common enough thing in NoVA these days, but a novelty on Church or Maple in Vienna.  You may or may not see the other end of that alleyway, as you drive past on Maple, depending on the landscaping.

The only other change that was obvious to me, just glancing at the new plans, is that they darkened the color of the retail “podium” portion of the building.   Between the last set of plans that I have, and this most recent set, the very light-colored brick was replaced with darker brick.  (This reduced what I called in a prior post the “came out of a different set of Legos” effect that the light-colored podium had before.)  They also added ornaments to the windows.  This is the before-and-after, below: