The Center of Developing Entrepreneurs (CODE) is a 10-story commercial office building w/ 2 public levels including a 15,000 SF co-working suite, a 225-person auditorium / lecture hall, retail food stalls and a grand main lobby and bar topped by 7 levels of core + shell office floor plates over a level of underground, structured parking. The CODE building sits at the western end of Charlottesville’s historic pedestrian mall designed by Lawrence Halprin. A dynamic urban campus and landscape, it is organized to attract and support various tenants working in different biotech and fintech disciplines as start ups with space to incubate and grow into new business models. Externally, the building had to respond to a two and three-story historic urban context and navigate a complex 5-sided site with 18 feet of grade change around its perimeter. With a party wall along one edge and no service or secondary street frontage along any edge, concealing the service areas and equipment required creativity. In response to the various building heights and elevation change along the public right-or-way, we gently stepped the massing - winding it in a spiral configuration around a central exterior courtyard – producing a series of green roof terraces at each floor and a common amphitheater and fountain at grade w/ a pedestrian gallery that allows the public to make an ADA accessible connection right through the middle of the building and the site. Engineered to perform for the health and wellbeing of a modern work environment, the building provides tenants with 2-1/2 times the required amount of fresh air and it consumes only 1/3 the energy of a typical office building. It retains and recycles over 45% of its own stormwater on site and 32% of it is covered by native plantings and pollinator gardens.

The project has been awarded a 2023 National AIA Honor Award; a 2023 Virginia AIA Honor Award; a 2022 Louisiana AIA Honor Award; a 2023 GOOOD DESIGN Sustainability Award for Green Architecture; a 2023 Virginia Energy Efficiency Leadership Award; a 2023 Virginia USGBC Design + Construction Award; and a 2023 Virginia USGBC People’s Choice Award. The project received LEED v4 Platinum Certification for Core + Shell.

CODE was designed in a collaborative partnership with our associate architects, Eskew Dumez Ripple. Photography by Alan Karshmer.