A cherished pillar of Washington, D.C.’s LGBTQ community, the nonprofit Whitman-Walker Health (WWH) has grown significantly since its establishment in 1978 as a free STD clinic for gay men. Now WWH offers a broad range of LGBTQ health care and social services at several locations throughout the city and benefits almost 16,000 people annually. In 2012, as part of a capital effort to better serve a client base that had doubled over the previous six years, WWH began a search for a space that could house comprehensive care services. In 2013 it leased a planned six-story, 42,000-square-foot building just two blocks south of the Elizabeth Taylor Medical Center—WWH’s primary location—in the Dupont-Logan neighborhoods that have been the heart of D.C. gay life for decades. The nonprofit turned to the D.C. office of Perkins+Will (P+W) to bring its vision to life.

The designers’ challenge? Creating a health-care facility in what the shell and core architects—local firm Eric Colbert & Associates—had originally envisioned as a boutique office mid-rise with a ground-floor restaurant. As the building’s construction hadn’tstarted, P+W was able to coordinate several changes, says project designer David Cordell, including dental-chair drain lines and certain slab penetrations, before the concrete was poured. The most significant alteration, however, was to the bathroom core: Whitman-Walker’s desire for all restrooms to be gender-neutral proved something of an interiordesign puzzle. “The fixture count stayed the same,” says Cordell, “but we had to be incredibly efficient with the layout to keep the overall footprint from growing.”