In the old La Plata Municipal building, two women in the finance department shared one small office that also housed the women's bathroom, town official Michelle Miner recalled.

In the new, larger Town Hall that opened Dec. 13, each of those finance staff members has a first-floor office, and on the second floor, Miner has a spacious office with a leather recliner, a television set, and the whole side of the building largely to herself.

"We've really moved up in the world," said Miner, the town's director of community development. "Sometimes it even feels kind of lonely because I'm the only one over here."

Town officials will hold a dedication ceremony and open house at 1 pm Friday to show off the $2.6 million Town Hall, which went up over the past year at La Grange Avenue and Queen Anne Street. The public can tour the building until 7:30 pm that day, officials said, and there will be refreshments and a slide presentation about the La Plata tornado by Mayor William Eckman.

The new building was completed less than a year after the town purchased the 2.2-acre plot for $650,000 - a schedule that was accelerated to accomodate the expansion of Civista Medical Center. The hospital, which purchased the old town hall on Garrett Avenue this year for $1.8 million, plans to demolish it in the middle of this month, said Michele Santiago, Civista's Marketing Director.

Civista's $82 million expansion, scheduled for completion in 2006, will add 60 private patient rooms and include more room for surgery, emergency, and radiology departments, among other changes.

The new 15,000 square-foot Town Hall, built by La Plata-based Facchina Construction Company, is about twice the size of the old building, said Doug Miller, the Town Manager. The architect, Manoj Dalaya, AIA, of McLean-based Kishimoto.Gordon.Dalaya PC, and town officials surveyed several other town halls in the region before choosing a design, Miller said. They came up with a brick facade guarded by four white Doric columns and topped with a soaring cupola.

"You'll see a little bit of Aberdeen, Maryland and some Herndon, Virginia in the design," Miller said.

On the first floor, there are nine offices and a Town Council chamber that seats 80 people, with the sound system wired to a terrazzo-tiled atrium in case of overflow crowds. An adjoining outdoor patio will overlook a landscaped grass berm where the town plans to host the summer evening concerts that were presented on the lawn at the old municipal building.

There are seven additional offices on the second floor, though one is unoccupied. Five could be added without major construction, Miner said. Only 14 people currently work at Town Hall, but officials said they expect to grow into their building over the years. The top floor is reserved for storage, something that was sorely lacking at the old building.

"This is one of those bittersweet things - the town hall on Garrett Avenue was kind of a home for us, and it would have lasted another 20 or 30 years," Miller said. "But you know what, I've got a window. I haven't had a window in my office for 17 years. I'm kind of liking that."

The thirty-year-old pedestrian tunnel leading beneath Hwy 1 into Arlington's Crystal City was in dire need of a makeover. Over time it had come to signify the entrance into Crystal City, an urban mixed-use community in close proximity to the Pentagon. But it was showing its age, both through deterioration and its dated design. When developer Charles E. Smith Commercial Realty began looking for a fresh look, Manoj Dalaya, AIA, of McLean-based Kishimoto.Gordon.Dalaya PC was there with a solution.

While Arlington officials remained indifferent, the developer had a vested interest in updating the tunnel's appearance. The company wanted a design that would take up a smaller footprint, resist vandalism, and permit quick clean-up while conveying a cutting-edge identity for the city. Dalaya began by exploring associations with the word "crystal." After experimenting with ideas from a crystalline sculpture to a shard of glass with a sewn canopy, the architect and developer settled on a tiered design that applied planes of glass to an exposed steel structure. The entry is distinctive enough to serve as a marker for the community, but transparent enough to allow visual connectivity between sides of the street. "We reduced the footprint by 25 percent by getting rid of ramps and putting in a chair lift," says Dalaya.

While custom steel plates would have been the ideal material to create the stepped design, the budget demanded the use of standard I-beams. Dalaya decided to simply cut them into two parts to create a custom frame. Horizontal canopy systems with translucent glass shield the interior and, when lit internally at night, emit a soft glow. "We wanted to celebrate the structure, and try not to enclose things," Dalaya says. "Internally, we wanted to keep all the materials intact, instead of just ripping things out. We wanted to clean and put a new stain on them to resist vandalism."

The new entry, completed in May, reflects Charles E. Smith's commitment to Crystal City's design quality. And, thanks to Dalaya, Arlington residents are starting to ask when other pedestrian tunnels will get a similar facelift.

-Rebecca E. Ivey

During the Civil War, Fort Evans was a formidable bastion overlooking the town of Leesburg and the Potomac River. Today, Fort Evans remains a symbol of protection, flanked by the North American headquarters of REHAU, a German plastics manufacturing company. A recent expansion of the headquarters reflects a keen sensitivity to the site's Civil War history, while embracing a Jeffersonian masterplan and modern building standards.

Situated on a commanding hill, the fort's remains are roughly rectangular, with extant earthworks about five feet high and 30 feet thick. Before the expansion, REHAU operated out of a prosaic 1950's-era building adjacent to the earthworks. Now a new 76,000 square-foot facility, designed by Kishimoto.Gordon.Dalaya of McLean, more than doubles the company's office capacity.

The new structure completes the first phase of a masterplan for the site, also developed by Kishimoto.Gordon.Dalaya. Although REHAU wanted to prepare for future growth, protection of the fort was parmount, says principal Ben Kishimoto, AIA. The new building is just one of several structures planned for development in a semi-circular pattern around the old one. With the existing building as the keystone of a symmetrical campus plan, the scheme is decidedly a nod to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.

"REHAU was aware that it was a foreign company building in this sensitive area," Kishimoto says. "The company wanted [to reflect] its culture, but it also wanted to be integrated with the local community."

To that end, the new building incorporates architectural elements of the existing building, including the use of regional stone. The existing building's northern and eastern facades are primarily glass, while the southern and western facades feature solid masonry with deep-set windows to provide natural shade. The architects, in turn, mimicked these features with similar window patterns and proportions in the new building. Their ordered composition of the exterior walls stole the attention of last year's Virginia Society AIA design awards jury, which recognized the project with an Award of Merit. Kishimoto.Gordon.Dalaya also incorporated European standards for daylighting and openness. They called for clear low-E glass for floor-to-ceiling windows, ten-foot-high ceilings, and a space plan that allows daylight to penetrate the interior. REHAU products, including a radiant floor heating system, were used throughout.

The landscape plan, developed by Oculus, of Washington, D.C., was particularly sensitive to the site's fragility. Suburban development is edging closer to the property, so the landscape architects planted seedlings in a naturalistic way that will eventually block views of developing areas, while preserving existing forest whenever possible. Surface parking is stepped down and away from the fort and buildings, shielded from workers' views by a stone wall that wraps around the plaza outside the building. "We tried to be thoughtful about where parking should be placed," says Don Hoover, principal of Oculus. "So when you're out on the plaza you don't even know the parking lot is there."

The landscape plan also calls for future preservation of the fort's earthworks, which are overgrown with trees that are hastening erosion. Over time, native warm-season grasses will be planted to stabilize the earthworks, as trees are gradually culled. "The fort is part of the history of Leesburg," Kishimoto says. "REHAU wanted to pay attention to that heritage, and we were completely on board."

-Kim A. O'Connell