News Articles, 1995-1997
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SOME's New Home Stands Out & Fits In

It is a vivid surprise on an ordinary Washington street -- a striking, idiosyncratic facade made of big windows, standard red bricks and brightly painted, industrial-strength steel beams.

The $1.3 million building puts a cheerful face on the serious business of So Others Might Eat (SOME), a nonprofit interfaith agency devoted to the needs of the poorest of the poor. It also is a fresh entry in Washington's ongoing sweepstakes of contextual architecture -- somehow it manages to fit in while standing out.

Behind the bright facade, on the ground floor, are rooms for social services and a medical and dental clinic. On the second floor are offices from which the Rev. John Adams and his staff direct the group's citywide operations.

Adams, a Catholic priest who has worked with the poor in various ways ever since he was ordained 27 years ago, explains that the building is a product of "listening sessions" the staff and volunteers hold every two or three years. "Our basic job is serving the people," he says, "and we ask ourselves how we can do that job better. A big response has been, `We need space.' "

You don't have to look far to see why. The new building, at 60 O St. NW, sits opposite a former animal hospital and pound that served as the group's home base for two decades. "We outgrew that place 10 years ago," Adams wryly notes, "but we made do."

Offices and clinical facilities were squeezed into every nook and cranny -- spaces that still feel crowded as soon as you walk into them, even though they've been emptied out. Mainly, that building was -- and is -- used as a dining hall. Twenty years ago SOME was serving 60 meals a day there. Now, it feeds about 600 people two times a day -- more than 400,000 individual meals a year, prepared and served by volunteers from area churches and synagogues.

The new building greatly increases both the dignity and efficiency with which other services are delivered. Inside, this is a clean, well-ordered environment, comparable in most ways to private-sector facilities. (Alas, that also means the interior is on the boring side.)

Providing natural light was a challenge -- the mid-block building is walled in on both sides, and extends 130 feet from front to back. The architects of Eric Colbert & Associates filled every square inch that the city's zoning code would allow, but, fortunately, there was enough space left over for several exterior decks on the second floor. Strategically placed, these also allow skylights for waiting and conference rooms on the first floor.

SOME is noted for the breadth of its attack on the problems of poverty. The very list of its programs is a short course in the complexity of needs: In addition to the meals and services it dispenses from its O Street properties, SOME operates three single-room-occupancy residences for more than 200 formerly homeless people, an apartment building for a dozen needy families, a homelike shelter for older people who have been abused, two neighborhood centers for the elderly, two houses where homeless men are taught job skills, a therapy center for homeless people who are mentally ill and, in West Virginia, a comprehensive 90-day program where homeless drug abusers are given a good chance to overcome their bad habits.

All of these services are housed in old buildings that had to be renovated and/or remodeled for their new uses. The Colbert firm had handled several of these straightforward tasks. When Eric Colbert told Adams and others that he wanted to do something unusual with the design of the agency's first brand-new building, "They said, `Go right ahead,' " he recalls. "They liked the idea."

The facade is by far the most interesting thing about the architecture. It's an abstract composition in the spirit of the early Dutch modernist group De Stijl (The Style) -- a lively, asymmetrical balance of emphatic rectangles with horizontal and vertical lines. Steel beams of varying thicknesses cut across the surface, and their colors -- buff yellow, bright red, purplish blue, deep green -- provide added visual bounce.

It could have been discordant, but it isn't. Partly, this is a matter of scale. The new building mediates between a higher apartment building on one side and lower row houses on the other -- it's like an animated hyphen. Nor does the new facade break entirely with convention. The composition contains references to the traditional base, middle and top -- the steel beam and elongated light fixture at the top are a fresh rendition of the traditional cornice.

There are other entertaining references to the local habitat. A triangle of steel at the top refers explicitly to heavy-duty pulleys of warehouses (now mostly vacant) in the neighborhood. The steel in this facade is also reminiscent both of nearby warehouse architecture and of stone lintels in the adjacent row houses, but it is deployed here in a different, more decorative way.

Simply said, this is a likable piece of work. It is good-humored rather than strident. Unfortunately, the aesthetic of the facade doesn't have much to do with that of the interior. This mainly was a matter of economy but is disappointing even so, for linking the two would have made the building even more meaningful.

The spiritual intention of the original De Stijl artists, back in the '20s -- the extra dimension of all those carefully balanced abstractions -- was to point to a world transformed by aesthetic harmony. Recalling this aim in the disharmonious '90s, in a building smack in the middle of one of Washington's poorest neighborhoods and for one of the city's most hard-pressed humanitarian agencies, takes a certain foolhardy courage. The irony is all too obvious.

Nonetheless, it is a gesture of profound hope by both the architects and the innovative managers of So Others Might Eat.

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