Rough sketches for the Silver Place development project show townhouses and office buildings, but no Trader Joe’s or Harris Teeter.

“The issue was of more traffic and service vehicles, and whether we can make retail have any critical scale,” John Torti, the project’s master planner, explained at Saturday’s wrap of a week-long charette (French for “brainstorm”).

“The conclusion was no,” Torti said.

The project’s original concept planted housing, retail and a new mothership for the planning department on the three-acre lot at Georgia Avenue and Spring Street. During the charette process, 40 conceptual designs were whittled down to 10, then seven, and finally one — without retail space.

“The idea of 50,000 square feet of retail was based on bigger buildings,” Torti said. “So we decided to eliminate retail from the plan.”

About that plan: It plants a 30- to 40-foot-tall building on Georgia at Spring for the planning board. The rest of the planning department gets new digs inside a 90-foot-tall office building on Georgia, next to the Crown Plaza Hotel.

Behind those buildings, the plan sets green space and residential buildings that reach up to nine stories towards the center of the lot, tapering to four stories on Spring Street.

Planning Place, a small street leading off Georgia, will cut through the lot to Spring Street but won’t lead traffic into Woodside and Woodside Park, two adjacent residential neighborhoods. Instead, traffic will flow towards downtown Silver Spring, Torti explained.

On top of that, Fenton Street also won’t be extended into the development. Blame an existing county-owned parking structure for blocking that one.

Torti emphasized that the charette’s findings illustrated only the “quality and scale” of building placement. Architectural details then will evolve from this envelope, he said.

It could be another five or six years before anyone moves into the proposed buildings, he said.

Images courtesy of SilverPlaceWorkshop.com.