Case Studies

Located on the important corner of 12th and Division Streets within the downtown highway loop of Nashville, Tenn., in an up-and-coming neighborhood known as The Gulch, the 14-story 290,000- square-foot Terrazzo building is a Class A office space with 117 residential condominiums and space for eight to 10 restaurants, retail units and nightclubs. Desiring to reinvigorate a blighted area of the city, the Tennessee Division of the Charlotte, N.C.-based development firm Crosland brought in Hastings Architecture & Associates LLC to design the Terrazzo property in this formerly industrial area.

The project’s basic goals were to create a vertically integrated, mixed-use project incorporating a high level of sustainable design. The building’s design was inspired by Nashville’s first ever high rise, the L&C Tower, built in the 1950s at the height of mid-century modern design. “That building incorporated granite and limestone and we wanted to do the same with Terrazzo,” explained principal architect David Bailey of Hastings Architecture & Associates, Nashville.

The overall design goals sought an attractive material with a natural character and warmth that would be unique in the Nashville area. These qualities were found in Coldspring’s Kasota Valley^® Limestone in a Cream Fleuri cut with a Honed finish and Mesabi Black^® granite in a Diamond® 8 finish.

The non-reflective honed finish is smooth to the touch and draws out the limestone’s natural gold and cream colors. The Diamond 8 finish highlights the Mesabi Black crystal structure while deepening its background hues.

Terrazzo was awarded Silver LEED certification by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). Achieving the certification makes Terrazzo the first LEED certified high-rise in downtown Nashville, as well as the largest LEED certified mixed-use residential high-rise in the Southeast. As a natural material with low embodied energy (energy used in production and manufacturing), and no VOC content, the stone material made sense from a compatibility standpoint with the goals of LEED certification. In addition, its use enabled the designers to create a tight, high-performance building envelope from an energy efficiency perspective. Other sustainable features of the building include high-performance glazing, high-efficiency HVAC systems, low toxicity materials and paints, green roofs and terraces, recycled content materials, construction waste recycling, and preferred parking for hybrid vehicles.  All told, Terrazzo was certified Silver with 28 points in the LEED CS program.