Office/retail complex built as extension of downtown

The City of Redmond, Washington, sprawling suburb and home of Microsoft Corp., almost had a four-anchor enclosed regional mall, planned and approved in the l980s. The 1989 bankruptcy of a major tenant intervened. When the project resurfaced in 1992, it was designed along new urbanist lines as a downtown retail district. “There was a lot of talk of New Urbanism, and those concepts fit in well with the site, adjacent to Redmond’s historic downtown,” says Roberta Lewandowski, city planning director. Also, many public officials, including mayor Rosemarie Ives, remained opposed to a mall. This could have presented problems for the developer, Winmar Company Inc. “They tried to woo the mayor with good design, and it worked,” she says. The first phase of the 120-acre, $200 million project opened in September, 1997, with 450,000 square feet of retail and office. The next phase, including new corporate headquarters for AT&T Wireless Services (formerly McCaw Cellular) is partly complete, with three office buildings occupied. Three more AT&T buildings, which will bring the headquarters to 600,000 square feet, are scheduled for completion in 1998. A Marriott hotel and 200 apartments also are planned. Eighty-five percent of the project is occupied or leased in advance. The project includes a 58-acre u-shaped perimeter park, with walking trails and a creek. With numerous plazas and public spaces, restaurants and coffee shops, a multiplex cinema and retail shops (the small-scale anchors are Borders Books and Eddie Bauer), Redmond Town Center has become a magnet for residents. “People were hungry for a place that they can just hang around and walk,” explains Lewandowski. “This is a pleasant place.” Business in retail stores, including Eddie Bauer, has doubled — sometimes tripled — projected numbers, officials say. Among greenfield new urban projects, Redmond Town Center is unusual in that it is so well connected to an existing town. The site is located between seldom-used freight railroad tracks and a state highway. Across the tracks is the older downtown of Redmond. The street grid was extended directly across the tracks. There are three vehicular connections, and one potential future connection. The older downtown does not have a high level of pedestrian activity, but some people are crossing the 100-foot-wide railroad right of way on foot into the new town center. “That proves that the pedestrian connection is working, to some extent,” says City of Redmond planner Judd Black. “I think the connection will strengthen over time as buildings in the old downtown reorient themselves.” The scale of the buildings in the new town center — consistently two stories with brick facades — is similar to that of the three-block old downtown. The site plan reveals that Redmond Town Center, in fact, is far more urban and pedestrian oriented than most of the older adjacent blocks. Architectural details of Redmond Town Center are relatively modern. Block sizes are city-scale, ranging from about 250 to 600 feet, according to Walt Niehoff, partner in the Seattle firm Loschky, Marquardt & Nesholm (LMN), project designers. LMN has designed enclosed malls, and Niehoff used some rules generally applied to malls, e.g. a shopper should walk a maximum of 300 feet from one “court” to the next. Buildings are a maximum of 300 feet, and blocks are often divided in the middle with a pedestrian walkway, plaza, or both. Architectural details change from building to building. “You never feel that you are on a 600 foot block, that was very manipulated through the whole process,” he says. The retail and office space therefore is broken into many smaller buildings. AT&T Wireless will occupy six buildings total, averaging 100,000 square feet. The footprints of the buildings range from 20,000 to 30,000 square feet, providing the firm with the large floor areas that high-tech companies demand, without creating an overwhelming scale at the street level. “We were sensitive to the fact that we couldn’t have a large building dominate the site,” says Niehoff. Streets generally are two-way with parking on both sides. The parking lanes are delineated by sidewalk bulbouts and lighter pavement. Crossing lanes at corners mostly have lighter colored pavement on retail blocks, and painted stripes on outlying blocks with office or other uses. These measures have ameliorated the problem of overwide streets built to city standards (12-foot travel lanes). “The city has been shamed by the town center, because they did such a nice job on their streets,” Lewandowski says. “Now we are redoing downtown streets and adding traffic calming devices.” Although the site plan shows a tremendous amount of parking — both in lots and structures — the mixed use design allowed for shared parking. “There is 100 percent offset between the movie theater and office space,” Niehoff explains. “A similar situation exists between office and restaurants. Every tenant has the full amount of parking they require, but the shared parking saves the developer money and saves land.”