Architectural Review Board Meeting   7/17/2023

It is 1.04 p.m.

I'm calling the July 17, 2023 meeting of the Albemarle County Architectural Review Board to order.

Sure.

Mr. Stoner?

Mr. Stoner is absent.

Mr. Hancock?

Thank you.

Just a few announcements.

Today's meeting is a hybrid meeting.

The public may access and participate in the meeting electronically.

Instructions for doing so are posted on the Albemarle County website at the Albemarle County calendar.

The public has real-time audio visual access to this meeting over Zoom and real-time audio access over telephone, both as provided in the lawfully posted meeting notice.

This meeting is being recorded and will be made available on the county's website.

This meeting is a public record and subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

All speakers, when it is your turn to speak, please first state your name for the record.

Applicants who are making presentations note that your presentation is limited to a total of 15 minutes, which you can divide among your team members.

Staff will let us know when the 15 minutes are up.

If applicants in the meeting room have teammates, team members attending virtually who will need to present, please make that known when you come to the podium.

Everyone who is participating virtually, please mute your microphone until it is your turn to speak.

Disclosures.

Thanks.

Public comment.

Are there any members of the public that want to make a comment about a project that is not on the agenda for review?

No, not that I see.

Thank you.

Consent agenda.

There are no consent agenda items today.

Regular review items.

There is one regular review item today.

It is ARV-2023-58,

Moore's Creek Admin Building.

Yes.

Thanks.

The application I'm presenting on today is the review of architecture and site plan to construct a building addition to the RWSA Admin Building, in addition to associated site improvements.

Project areas located within the RWS Morris Creek Treatment Plant, which is north of I-64 between the Rivanna River and the Route 20 interchange.

To summarize the staff report, there are minor comments on the visibility of mechanical equipment and site plan that needed to be addressed.

This thing building was built prior to the establishment of the entrance quarters, but uses red brick as a primary material, which connects it to a material used historically throughout the county.

The proposed building design addition also uses red brick in addition to other materials and colors to relate to those found in the existing building.

One issue noted in the staff report regarding the building is the potential visual impact of the proposed roof-mounted solar panels on the entrance corridor, particularly those on the flat roof portion of the addition.

Drawings that show the relationship between the panels on the flat roof and the parapet would be needed to clarify visibility of the panels.

Staff recommends approval of the major amendment with revisions like this in the staff report.

Thanks, Chris.

No, Chris.

Thank you for your report.

Appreciate it.

Thank you.

No questions.

I don't have any questions either, Chris, thank you.

Do we have anyone from the applicant?

Is there somebody online?

Yes, go ahead.

I'm the principal of i5 architecture in Louisville, Virginia.

I'm the local architect for this project.

I also want to say that when I refer to him from CAAH, he's one of the principal architects.

He can also speak to the other CAAH continuing

and today also with Sam Harlow with our office at Drive.

She's going to share the deck for us.

So I wanted to just touch on a few things maybe that Chris had mentioned in the staff report.

Sam, I think you can share.

Yeah, Chris mentioned the proximity to the highway there.

Highways at the bottom of this page, the three circles there kind of represent some viewpoints that we've found sort of through the trees to that building.

So I'll show that to you in a minute.

I think those were also included in the package that we submitted.

And Sam, you can click over.

I think you've seen these, a couple of images.

Of course, the highways beyond the tree line behind this

Building here.

The existing building here on the left side is the facade that's facing the highway.

So fairly blank, predominantly metal panel.

A little bit of brick is on that south-facing side.

The addition will sit where these cars are and attach to this east side of the existing building.

Again, this is the side facing the highway.

The one comment I would say here, we can talk about a little bit more if necessary.

The mechanical that you see here for the most part goes away.

There will be some ground mounted mechanical.

We don't have a lot of fidelity on that yet based on the phase where the engineers are.

There are some labs in this building and it'll have lab exhaust.

We're certainly hoping to take that up internally and take that through the roof rather than have it mounted

externally, but we do anticipate some ground-mounted mechanical equipment that we'll do our best to screen.

We can be in touch with Chris about that.

And this is facing the west, not terribly visible from the EC.

Yeah, so I just wanted to point out a couple of things.

Many of you have driven it.

Several times I'm sure whether you've driven it since this project kind of landed in the hopper.

I'm not sure.

Certainly now it's impossible to see from any point.

Our analysis is you can't see the site from eastbound 64 at all.

You cannot see it from westbound 64 when the leaves are out.

And Sam, you can click over.

There are just a few spots where if you know exactly what you're looking for, you can pick it out when the leaves are down.

These were three views kind of looking from the southeast, from the south, and from the southwest.

And Sam, click over one more.

Yeah, so certainly this is from these pictures just for for reference are from Google Street View and very hard to find a spot where you can see this much so we kind of pulled some stop stills from that but this is the existing condition

You go to the next spot on Google and you can't see it, so you've got to find the next hole in the woods.

Just kind of straight on, looking at where we are, you can see there's just a little bit of a shadow of the existing building there on the left.

And the additional would be just to the right of that, of course, closer to that existing parking lot.

And this is actually a little bit past the site.

Looking back, it would be looking over your shoulder, kind of backwards as you're going past.

is maybe where there's the most visibility back to the building, but certainly would not be many people who would kind of see from this view, but we recognize that it is partially visible from here.

So Sam, yeah, so Sam, maybe you could just point out where we anticipate that mechanical equipment.

I think we recognize it's gonna be kind of a topic of further communication

and there on that north side too is also some minor kind of deliveries for lab supplies.

So that's the new kind of drive route that comes up in the south center of the existing building.

Yeah, right through there.

Chris did mention there's some retaining walls in the site plan to enable some of this additional parking.

So you can see the retaining wall, Sam top left of the screen is a top, yeah, top left.

Yeah, retaining wall there.

So certainly we expect to screen that with some evergreens from the entrance corridor.

And you can see the photovoltaics here that Chris mentioned.

On the existing building, page right, those would be mounted to the existing metal roof would kind of follow the seams of the existing roof.

We think that is a good way to do that.

Certainly it's maximizes production from an energy standpoint.

On the proposed building, kind of top left there, that's on the flat roof behind the parapet.

We don't think those are visible at all.

And bottom of the page there on the addition, that's a low sloping roof that does tilt slightly towards the highway.

The panels there will be mounted kind of flush to the surface also.

We think that's

Fairly minor, we can look at that a little bit more in the site section.

Yeah, so this is a little bit, maybe easier way to get a sense about that.

To orient you in my drawing at the top, far right is eastbound 64, the lower lane there is kind of westbound 64.

Of course, they are a little bit higher.

Sam, could you point to the low slipping roof there and the parapet?

On that low slipping roof, some photovoltaics, we think just because they're almost at eye height, very difficult to see those.

And on the flat roof, we think not visible at all.

So really the only ones that are not represented in this section, but the only ones that you might be able to get a line of sight to if there was an opening in the trees of the ones mounted on the backside of the hip of the existing roof.

And Sam, I think you can click.

Yeah, I wouldn't spend a ton of time here.

I think Chris did a good job in his staff report.

Certainly, we're very concerned about kind of the rhythm, connection to existing materials, kind of a new roof form there on the entry side that mimics the existing ever-hanging hip and trying to create a sense of scale with the rhythm and with the differing base material there.

These are east and west facing, and Sam, you could click.

And yeah, so these you saw, I think, in the submitted material.

We do have a couple of the renderings in here if we need to refer back to them.

Sam, you could click through to those, please.

So this is the side facing the entrance corridor.

You can see the darker material there on the existing building on page left.

I think the metal panels here on the right side are rendering a little bit lighter, maybe, than our enchants.

Certainly, we would expect to come back to you with some material samples as we look through that.

Chris did also mention the spandrel panels here.

I think you can pick out, Paige, the kind of mid-tone gray is where we've got opacity.

And at least when it's in shadow, the darker pieces there are the glass.

Probably a little hard to say right now 100% if that's spandrel glass, as Chris said, or maybe that's another opaque material in the spandrel location.

Again, I think we could talk through that and work through that with staff.

And Sam, you could probably click, yeah, so just a little bit closer view of that same thing.

There is on the south side employee amenity area, outside terraces, those white things or umbrellas, if that's not 100% obvious at the scale you're looking at it.

That's a little bit of our accessible parking there.

Yeah, and you can go ahead, Sam.

Yeah, east side, not very visible.

Again, the highways beyond the trees on the left.

That's facing the opposite way, but it gives you a sense of kind of the articulation of the architecture and how that relates back to the existing building.

Again, you can see the pieces of spandrel.

And then we did add this.

This is not in the material we submitted, but we took the line work out of the massing and the modeling and dropped it in at scale over that Google Street view and tried to just fade that out a little.

It's on I think you understand is beyond all the trees in this this picture.

But there on the left is the existing

and on the right you just get kind of a hint or shadow where that proposed addition is.

Most of that parking or all the parking I guess is in existing parking or graded areas so we don't think that we're dropping any trees on the Rivanna site or if we are certainly very very small amount to kind of get that new parking in there.

And I think that's the last thing we had for you today.

Thank you for your presentation.

Sure.

Thank you very much for your presentation.

Two questions, I guess.

Appreciate the street views from 64.

Yeah, that's a good question.

I think most of them, maybe two thirds of them are in the right of way.

I don't know if we have a, Sam, can you get back to the site plan?

I don't think that

Thank you.

I don't know if I can speak to that.

I would just say in my mind, they haven't been specified yet.

I kind of think of them as the typical or standard

Solar Panel.

So from my recollection perspective, I don't feel like there's an enormous range in the kind of color tone, that kind of deep blue-gray tone, maybe, and not a tremendous range in the reflectivity.

No, I don't.

Thank you for your presentation.

Thank you for your presentation.

Just one quick question about the proposed landscaping around the new parking lot or on the parking lot side, I guess, between the building and 64.

Are you planning to provide any plantings, I guess, on that edge of the parking

You know, let me see if I can annotate here.

Might be easier.

I would just say that this is probably the areas where we're anticipating maybe some mechanical.

I don't honestly recall, I don't know if Sam or Brian do, if there's any proposed landscaping right there because that area hasn't changed much.

So we'd expect to do maybe screening closer to that mechanical.

This is the area over here and going farther to the east on page left where we've got some screening of the retaining wall that you see there and the screening of the parking and then otherwise most of the landscaping is kind of closer in landscaping.

Yes, I guess top left.

Am I reading that right?

That if there were any evergreen trees there or any canopy, large canopy trees there, they might help with some of the screening.

Yeah, this is kind of existing canopy up here.

So I think we're expecting to just have the evergreen screen at the bottom of the foot of the retaining wall.

The retaining wall is not huge right here.

Yes, understood.

Okay, thank you.

Sure.

I think the building is very nicely designed and really builds nicely on the existing materiality on the site.

I think it's nicely sited and a nice way to get more massing and more capacity there.

I think my, and certainly to the solar panels, I think certainly it's wonderful to have renewable energy on site.

I think our guidelines still classify them as mechanical equipment and still require us to limit the visibility of them.

I think

from the sections the applicant provided.

I'm satisfied that those on the new building should not be visible.

I think those on the steeper sloped portion of the existing one may be.

Thank you, Dave.

Yeah, I agree with Dave.

I think it's going to be one of the nicest buildings on the site.

It's well done by the applicant.

And yeah, I echo your thoughts on the solar panels as well.

I think if there's a way to make it work, I don't think that I think to the extent that we can minimize the effect of the guidelines on renewable energy generation here in the county, that'd be great.

Agreed.

Yeah, I think to me, the focus is the panels on the existing building.

But I think there's a way to screen it.

I could be convinced that proposed landscaping could mitigate that effect on the corridor and screen it per our guidelines.

You switched the input to the presentation input.

I've flipped the page to orient it as you

be viewing the site from I-64 entrance corner.

So it's upside down, but it's...

And is it correct to understand that the colored trees and plants are proposed additions to the site?

Right.

I think so.

I think it'd be helpful to look at that section that showed an elevation of the westbound 64 in relation to the building.

I think that'd be another way to look at it.

I think the American Holly, I think, would do well there.

Do we know the dimension on any of the plans?

I don't believe so.

When we were looking at this and thinking about the visibility of the panels on the existing building in the proposed addition, we felt that the arrangement of the panels on the sloped roof of the existing building would just sort of help those just sort of blend into that angled roof and given the

Thank you, Margaret.

Do you want to look at the motion?

What's that?

Property line at 64.

I think that might be the closest approximate.

Place correctly.

So the property line in this looks pretty correct.

And the labeling 64, I'm not sure if it's as close as it's showing in the site plan.

Labels are to scale.

Sorry, I didn't quite catch that.

The labels, I'm not sure.

Thank you, that's helpful.

There's still a fair amount of vegetation on the site.

It's not like it's right at the back of the parking lot.

No, I don't think so.

Thank you.

Site plan?

This is a major amendment, but and this is obviously the first time that you're looking at this proposal.

We thought given the amount of wooded area that is adding to the or creating the limited visibility that we were just going to recommend approval with the conditions that were listed here not needing to come back again.

Of course, if you all have concerns and want to see it again, then that would be the

Thank you.

Could I just ask, I was a little confused about the landscape plan with the screening on the retaining wall.

That's correct.

All right.

OK, great.

Thank you.

I mean, I think we were all thinking that the equipment may be visible, but it would be mitigated by certain other factors, existing screening.

So is it, I mean, I know that it's in our guidelines that these notes shall be added, but

Is it really going to be completely eliminated in the way that you would eliminate like, I don't know, some piece of mechanical equipment with a parapet wall or something?

Yeah, I don't have an issue with it either.

Could change eliminated to mitigated or get rid of the sentence?

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think I would look to the applicant to, you know, specify those plantings.

You know, right now it's just from a list.

So it could, but I think once that's nailed down and studied in section and kind of how the grades relate

I think it's up to the applicant to prove that.

And I think it can be done on a staff level.

Like, I don't know that it needs to come back here unless they can't prove it.

I'm hesitant to say, for this application, we'll say mitigated, but for every other application we've said, eliminate.

I wanna kind of stick to our guidelines.

I understand what you're saying.

Like, what we've seen, it's not eliminated.

Does that make sense?

Does that give you enough or you feel comfortable working with the applicant too?

I'll second.

Mr. Matsuno?

Aye.

Mr. Van Der Werf?

Aye.

Aye.

Thank you.

Moving to work sessions.

There are no work sessions today.

So moved.

Mr. Matsuno?

Aye.

Aye.

Other items?

If you all recall earlier this year the board reviewed a proposal for the trading posts along Route 29 South to add BP branding.

We brought this item to the board due to the design being inconsistent with ARB design guidelines and previous approved BP canopy designs in the county.

During this review, staff noted a few canopies that had unapproved changes since the board approved their designs.

As you see in the first slide, this is the one that was approved during a recent drive-by survey.

The facia of the canopy matches what was approved by the board.

Also Route 29, look left to right, green has been added to the posts and the facia has also been changed to green to kind of match BP's branding color.

One is Alden Crozet, theme green has been added to the support polls.

No other changes are observed during the site visit.

and this one on a rock fish gap turnpike observed during site that matches what is approved by the board.

Once again, this is the most recently approved BP canopy.

You know, I think the main issue was that the canopy guidelines say that there should be one primary color with one possible accent color.

And that was one of the main issues for that canopy.

Before you do any discussion, one last item that was noted in

Surveys or I guess I shouldn't say what's not noted in most of the surveys is the illumination of the graphic.

Most if not all the approved plans note that the background shall be opaque.

I regularly take the route through passing through the Pantops BP and I've noted that background is fully illuminated so if you look left and right the white

It's what staff's considered in the background in white and the helios graphic, the lumates at night, versus just the helios, as you can see, indicated on the right.

That wasn't noted in other surveys because they were daytime surveys.

Yes.

kind of certificates of appropriateness.

Running back through again, the one on the right was the most recent one that has ARB approval.

This one has no previous review and was stalled without ARB application.

The one on the left is ultimately what was approved by the board over the course of time.

It's the current site condition on the right.

Once again, the one on the left is what's ultimately approved by the board.

writes what's the current condition over time.

And then again, this is a straight view, but that's ultimately what was approved by the board.

Isn't it a question of, sorry to interrupt you.

The ones that were approved, wouldn't it be a zoning violation if they've changed something from the approved?

That is right.

We wanted to just get your input on the changes.

There's sort of a big range in the changes.

wanted your input on perhaps the green post or the upper portion of the green post.

Maybe you don't think that's a big concern or maybe you do.

I mean it makes sense as Frank said to me that they just be requested to return them to their approved condition or to make an application for a change.

Personally I think most of the instances we've seen the buildings like have white trim or other things so the green is a little bit out of place, at least in this view.

So I initially don't think I'd be supportive of

An application that requested changing the post color to green.

Now I'm convinced there's a staff member that's working undercover ARB agent.

Just, I'm just kidding.

Neil's shaking his head.

Tara?

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah, some of them, I mean, the green, you could maybe consider it a primary,

but I do think that they should be following the process that's laid out for changes along the entrance corridor.

Thank you.

Thank you.

No, and I mean, spend a lot of time talking about gas station canopies.

Any other items?

Thank you.

We'll adjourn the meeting.

It is 1.49pm.

All right.

Thank you.

Great.