PeakDash

As Robert Seldin showed Answer Man around the top floor of a vacant office building in Baileys Crossroads, a thought came to mind: What this place needs is some henchmen.

Henchmen, henchwomen, henchpeople, minions … Call them what you will, 5111 Leesburg Pike could use dozens of jump-suited underlings scurrying around as the roof slides back and a droning voice counts down ominously.

“It’s an interesting artifact,” Seldin said of the curious space, the cavernous mechanical penthouse of a 1983 building whose original tenants included defense contractors. “It was built in the late stages of the Cold War.”

Seldin is the CEO of Highland Square Holdings, the developers who are transforming most of the office buildings of what’s called Skyline into live/work spaces. (More on that later.) As Seldin’s team inspected their new acquisition, they realized there were some oddities in what’s known as Building 5, a resolutely beige nine-story structure. The concrete floor of the mechanical penthouse — where the HVAC system lives — is nearly twice as thick as would be expected.

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“It's designed to hold super-heavy things,” Seldin said.

The ceiling is high, too: 24 feet. And while most of the building’s roof is solid, there’s a large corrugated metal panel over one portion of the penthouse.

“This portion of the roof is very easy to remove,” Seldin said, suggesting that someone wanted to store things here that could be loaded in with a crane.

Those things would be heavy and, Seldin surmised, able to exit the building on their own. All this is why Seldin thinks 5111 Leesburg Pike was designed to accommodate surface-to-air missiles.

“This is the only building in the complex that has this feature,” he said.

Not that it ever actually held missiles. Seldin thinks the original request for proposal included the specifications just in case.

“The government always wants to give itself maximum flexibility,” he said. “It was a time when we were focused on preparedness.”

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But were missiles ever really part of the plan? Robert Peck isn’t so sure. Peck served as a high-ranking official with the General Services Administration during the Clinton and Obama administrations and now works for architecture firm Gensler.

“In the Cold War, there were all sorts of weird things going on,” Peck said. But, as a policy, “the government tries to avoid putting huge amounts of extra money into a building it doesn’t own.”

And that applies to Building 5, which was developed and originally owned by the Charles E. Smith Companies. Those area buildings that do have missiles — such as the White House — are government-owned.

Peck thinks the site wouldn’t really work for missiles, anyway. It’s not that high. And you wouldn’t want to fire something like a Stinger through a hole in the ceiling of the enclosed penthouse because of the enormous back blast that would be produced.

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At Answer Man’s request, Peck reached out to other GSA old-timers. None had any specific knowledge of a provision for missiles at Skyline.

Said Peck: “There is a possibility somebody wanted to mount some kind of a telescope or maybe some kind of surveillance equipment, if they wanted to look at something. Or secret computers. Those are the sorts of things that do happen in some government buildings.”

As fascinating as these quirky design features may be, what Seldin really wants to talk about is the future of Building 5 and of the concept of the office building in general.

“At its core, an office building is a machine for temporarily storing people and permanently storing information for processing,” he said. “Historically, you would need to go to the building to get the information you needed to do your job. Ever since 2007 — when the iPhone was introduced — most people can now carry in their pockets the sum total of knowledge from human history.”

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Building technology, Seldin says, hasn't kept up with information technology. “We have currently a pretty deep schism between what people want to do and the places they're allowed to do it,” he said. “And so what we’ve been trying to do is eliminate that friction.”

That includes working with Fairfax County to change the zoning of the buildings so people can live in them, work in them and run businesses from them. The wide, open cubicle farm floors are being divided into individual apartments. The units are getting more electrical power than traditional apartments, Seldin said. Emergency generators will keep the juice going during an outage.

Similar work was done at the company’s first live/work development, Mission Lofts in Falls Church.

As for that strong-floored, high-ceilinged, possibly (but probably not) missile-ready space in the penthouse?

“We want to put a pool in here,” Seldin said.

Let’s hope the pool at least has sharks with lasers.

Questions, please

Thanks to Zan McKelway for turning Answer Man on to Skyline’s Building 5 and to Chris Barbuschak, archivist/librarian in the Fairfax Virginia Room, for research help. Send your questions about the D.C. area to answerman@washpost.com.

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