Todd and I took a trip down to the Montgomery Park office complex yesterday afternoon to check out the building. It is a huge (1.3M square feet) ex-warehouse on a B&O spur, built in 1923 for Montgomery Ward. As you travel north from Washington DC and rise over the hill to Baltimore, it sits off to the left, alone in a blighted landscape of industrial parks and run-down neighborhoods. It’s been empty for years, but sometime last year they started lighting it up at night, and everybody soon realized where it was and just how big it was.
The sheer size of the place overwhelms you—each floor is a cavernous forest of high ceilings and thick, fat pillars lined up in rows. Some of the floors are totally renovated, and others are barely cleared. There is a courtyard with a building in the center, sporting a living roof, and the whole building catches runoff to be recycled into the wastewater system.
We were both very impressed with the space, and sort of overwhelmed with it all. There’s too much size to be comprehended there. But we were glad that the developers decided to retain a lot of the original details- the windows, the pillars, the cielings-instead of plastering over them.