The Marriott Marquis Washington, DC convention hotel is located in the District of Columbia next to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center and is one of four Marquis properties in the world. The project consists of 1,175 guestrooms on fourteen floors above the lobby and more than 105,000 sf of meeting and assembly space. The heart of the hotel will be the Grand Lobby which is a large, open, welcoming space activated with natural daylight from an interior atrium with a glass roof over 130’ above the ground floor. Around the perimeter of the hotel, five publicly accessible retail and restaurant outlets will help activate the neighborhood. The design of the hotel is inspired and influenced by the unique context in which it is located. As an urban infill project, it is situated in a neighborhood that ranges in scale and use from large civic facilities to fine grain residential. The massing and the transparency of the design is born out of a desire to respond and connect to this context. The hotel itself even incorporates an adjacent historic building that is repurposed as unique guestrooms for the larger hotel. The overall design approach reflects an appropriate level of contemporary thinking while respecting the undeniable architectural traditions of our nation’s capital.