Fox Building Apartments

The project site is located on the valley wall of the Jones Falls valley, the location of many of Baltimore’s original factories and mills which took advantage of elevation changes for power and water needs. The original structure was built at the highest point of the site. Expansion was to the north and descending down hill with the “new’ loading docks thirty-six feet below the original factory floor. Constrained by steep slopes and roads on all sides, the design reuses existing pavement to accommodate parking needs. A pool, and fire pit occur in the area of former material tanks and an incinerator.

This project achieves a successful adaptive reuse of a former industrial building into apartments and artists studios. Originally built by the noxzema company, it was last used by the fox companies who specializes in concrete additives. Unique among the nearby mill conversions, the designs restores and celebrates the post war modernist aesthetic and rational structural order of the original facility. A national park service and state historic tax credit project, the design preserves and re-purposes original elements, using them as significant components of the new design.

Unlike many of the other mill conversions in the area, this project restores and celebrates the post war modern aesthetic of the original building and leverages the structural order of the original factory. The existing facility consisted of not only the original factory building, which was constructed at the highest point on the site, but several additions that were made between 1926 and 1962. Since the complex is located on a steep hill within the Jones Falls River Valley, the historic expansions are reflective of the many site constraints as well as balancing the practical needs for production within. The resulting form is one with tenuous connections between structures and a wide array of discontinuous floor levels across the complex.