What It's Like To Be A Walmart Architect

Late last year, I visited one of the first two Walmart stores to open in Washington, D.C., and discovered a Walmart unlike almost any other in the United States. It was a thoughtfully designed store with a spacious vestibule, parking hidden underground, and--wonder of wonders--windows. You can stand inside that store at the corner of Georgia and Missouri Avenues NW and actually see the color of the sky. Ive been reporting on the big box retailer for a decade, and that Washington, D.C., store was so distinctive that it inspired a thought no Walmart ever has: Who designed this space?

All Walmart stores have architects, of course. But the stores are so uniform--they are numbered, in order of opening, for easy identification--its hard to tell what the architects do. Presumably, they make sure the walls meet the floor and the ceiling at perfect 90-degree angles. I put in a call asking to talk to someone who had been involved in the design of Walmart No. 5968 in Washington, D.C., I mentioned the windows.

About 90 minutes after my request, I got a call from Gabe Massa of MMA Architects, who helped design this Walmart. I asked him how it was that this store managed to be so different and he laughed. Thats a really loaded question, he said. Way before Walmart brought us on, there were a lot of discussions with the developers and the city. Walmart, it turns out, is working with planners, communities, and architects to bring smarter, urban-centric design to cities like D.C. The design difference at this particular store came down to two key things: meetings and inspiration from a historic car barn.

Massas firm was asked to design the Georgia Avenue store in part because of its experience putting stores in urban settings. His firm has 20 Walmart stores in the mid-Atlantic and the northeast that are either in design or finished (they also do stores for CVS, Office Depot, and ACME supermarkets).

There were a lot of meetings in the stores Brightwood neighborhood with local officials, residents, planning board members, members of the historic preservation group. The planning process--which lasted almost three years--and the design reviews vested the community in the way the store looked.

They got a better store than they would have without the design review, says Rebecca Miller, executive director of the DC Preservation League, which worked closely with the city, Massa, and Walmart on the design of the store. Those meetings offered the opportunity to bounce ideas off each other--they were like brainstorming sessions. They ended up with much better ideas than they would have come up with on their own.

We looked at this location, Massa said, and there was an old car barn there that had been built in 1908. It originally held horses and buggies. It burned and was rebuilt. Then it was used for Washingtons trolley car system. The car barn stopped being used by D.C.s mass transit system in 1955, but it was still on the property, tucked behind a Chevrolet dealership that had gone out of business.

The car barn was not a distinguished piece of architecture. It was a boxy building, with wide-open spaces along the front to allow the trolley cars to enter and leave. History is not always beautiful, Miller. It was very much a utilitarian building--it was not high style. But that car barn had an enormous impact on the development of this neighborhood.

Rendering, Fort Totten Square, Washington, D.C., by Hickok Cole Architects

And it caught Massas imagination. The car barn helped make Brightwood a destination early in the century, he said. We wanted to try to make Brightwood a destination again. The designers also wanted to echo the car barns utilitarian and industrial feel. In fact, two of the most distinctive visual features of the Georgia Avenue Walmart are its rugged brick interior facade, with many of the bricks looking old, flecked with paint. Inside, one third of the store is devoted to groceries, and that section sits under an unusual peaked roof that is all glass, supported by robust metal trusses with visible rivets. All very un-Walmart-esque.

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What It's Like To Be A Walmart Architect