Most of DBA’s buildings are “podium construction”—that is, the first one or two floors are a concrete “podium” structure with the upper floors, generally framed in wood, sitting upon this podium.
Podiums allow us to make bigger, taller buildings than we could with just wood construction. We love them because they give us the design flexibility to make great ground floors—critical to urban vitality and the success of mixed-use buildings.
Walls Don't Need to Stack
The walls of the wood residential floors above the podium don’t need to continue down to the ground, so the podium can have different sized rooms than the floors above. This allows ground-floor spaces to be combined, divided, and recombined at a later date without affecting the structure of the building, which gives us flexibility in the design now as well as 20 years from now.