The Wilder is an affordable, adaptive-reuse, multifamily complex in the heart of Nashville—but it’s not your average apartment building.
In late summer 2021, Clay Adkisson, founder of Nashville-based urban design firm Openworks, was driving down the interstate in Nashville when something caught his attention. To the naked eye, it looked like a run-down, dilapidated Super 8 motel from the 1970s. To Adkisson, it looked like the future of multifamily construction.
“Just picture, ‘blighted, old motel,’” says Allen Buchanan, a principal at Dowdle Construction, the general contractor and construction partner on the project, “because that’s what it was.”…