Project type: Adaptive Reuse, Renovation, or Historic Preservation
Merit
Project name:Honnen Arts Hub
Project overview:The design adapts and re-uses an abandoned ice hockey rink (1961), engaging its 80’ clear span concrete vault structure to create a carbon negative, accessible new 30,000 SF Arts Hub with a large fabrication shop, foundry, kilns, studio classrooms, offices and gallery space. The design team led programming workshops with faculty and staff across art, sculpture, digital design, and art history departments to develop a cross-disciplinary arts program organized around a generous internal “street” with flexible space for making and discussion.
The curved forms of the concrete vault structure inspire a contemporary, affordable design language of arcs that unifies the design of the Honnen Arts Hub. Pops of color on wall and floor surfaces provide placemaking and human scale, treating no-VOC paint as a spatially impactful minimal material that recalls the red sandstone of the surrounding high plains. The design provides comprehensive new infrastructure. Energy efficient lighting, life safety and MEP services are integrated along the directional spans of the vaults where existing concrete was treated to reflect indirect light and distribute natural daylight from the perimeter. The design’s innovative, sustainable system of displacement ventilation avoids the need for energy and costs of mechanical cooling.
Using color and transparency in a new glazed exterior envelope, this adaptive re-use design establishes a new public entry and visible presence for the Arts at a prominent campus corner and enables an unused Hockey Arena to serve as an innovative Arts Hub and a missing active node along a major Campus Pedestrian Corridor.
Project location:Colorado Springs, Colorado
Firm name:Kennedy & Violich Architecture
Architect of Record:Frano Violich
Completion: 2024
Client: Colorado College
Jury comments:A bold, confident project that celebrates structure in a beautiful, playful way, transforming a former hockey rink into a flexible interdisciplinary arts hub. Cleverly executed with minimal means, it does a lot with less using strategic design and low-cost creativity to make the most of the existing long-span concrete vaults. The result is a beautiful space with a strong yet neutral identity, maximizing daylight, passive ventilation, and environmental benefit while preserving embodied carbon. Inspiring in its restraint, the project provokes questions and supports a wide range of activities.
Images/Photographer(s):Frank Ooms General Contractor:GH Phipps Project or Construction Manager:Frano Violich Civil Engineer:Terra Nova Engineering, Inc Structural:Steve Horner Mechanical:Jared T. McMullen Electrical:Job Guerra Plumbing:Dough E. Hatfield Lighting:Available Light
