A New Mauvescraper for Reston, Plus Another On Its Side

One of the last chunks of surface parking in Reston's fake downtown gritty urban core will soon be replaced by a 15-story mauvescraper.

Boston Properties, which owns the last undeveloped Reston Town Center parcel between St. Francis, Bluemont and Explorer Street and Town Square, will build a fancy "luxury rental" building with 359 units and 29,000 square feet of retail on the ground floor. The complex will also have a six-story parking structure that's "integrated into the mixed-use building." If approved by the usual suspects, construction will begin at the end of the year or in early 2012. Boston Properties also owns the parcel of land just south of RTC currently being leased by the county for a temporary park-and-ride lot, which it presumably will develop once the fancy new garage is built at the Wiehle Metro Station.

So, um, yay. Meanwhile, we've learned a little more about the fate of the mauvescraper in version 2.0 of JBG's awesome Fairway Apartments redevelopment proposal, which the developer recently postponed bringing back before the Reston Planning & Zoning Committee. A Confidential Restonian Operative tells us a little about the proposal:

FWIW, the JBG proposal presented to the DRB basically tipped that large tower on its side creating a 500' building wall facing the golf course. It also:
--created two rows of 4-story townhouses along the road-side periphery to mask the massive building
--added lots of impermeable surface parking (aka: asphalt)
--cut down oodles (that's a technical term) of trees (& don't they always?)
--oh, yes, created a small playground park in the middle surrounded by asphalt & buildings.

One DRB member characterized it as similar, but worse than JBG's original proposal.

Would you call that a landscraper, or maybe just a big rancher? We haven't seen any of the fancy planning renderings of the new proposal that we love us so bad, but at great expense, we got an up and coming architect to create this drawring of what the new proposal just might look like:

You're welcome.