Demolition has begun at the future home of United Therapeutics‘ Unisphere Annex building in downtown Silver Spring.
The property, previously home to a dual-branded Hampton Inn/Homewood Suites hotel at 8728 Colesville Rd., was purchased by UT in October of 2021 with plans to build additional office space. The hotel closed soon after the purchase.
“Among other things, we plan to house employees that support our efforts to develop, produce, and deliver our medicines to patients in need,” UT’s director of investor relations Dewey Steadman told the Source in 2021. “It is not intended to be a manufacturing facility.”
UT hosted a virtual presubmission community meeting in April of last year to present the company’s initial concept to redevelop the property.
The Unisphere Annex will be an addition to UT’s net-zero Unisphere building at the corner of Colesville Rd. and Spring St., which opened in 2018. EwingCole is once again UT’s architecture/engineering firm. Along Spring Street, the company has worked on at least four other UT buildings.
The slide deck presented at the community meeting revealed that the Unisphere Annex will replace a 145-foot-high building (13 stories) with one 85-foot high, with 20 feet of solar panels on top. Solar and geothermal technologies will be used in the new building, as in the Unisphere, to achieve net-zero carbon emissions. Moreover, Steadman said last year, “The building will also be constructed using mass timber construction in place of steel beams.”
It has not been announced when the project will be completed.
Rendering courtesy UT/EwingCole