City Water

Project Details

Project Description

This project converts an abandoned automobile dealership to offices and warehouses for a municipal water division. Rigorously simplifying diverse program components allowed for logical reuse of existing structures. The office building, a sustainably-designed glass prism under a vegetated roof, exaggerates the extraverted spirit of the original showroom, bathing occupants in daylight. New materials and details on the pre-engineered warehouses visually separate planes, expressing low-sloped roofs as floating undulations, referencing the sloping site. Site improvements include re-milling and reuse of existing asphalt, xeriscaping and rain gardens. This LEED Gold project is the City of Columbia’s first sustainable facility.

This project houses all Water and Wastewater Management administration, crews, technicians, vehicle fleet, and emergency equipment and materials for a capitol city. Previously, for decades, all staff and crew occupied a former, windowless “big box” chain store, in a circuitous, disorganized array of thrown together offices and random spaces. At the start of the project, therefore, optimal adjacencies and distribution of personnel and resources were quite unclear to both client and architect. Through a rigorous programming effort, project requirements became simplified, and a streamlined picture emerged for how to efficiently utilize the separate existing structures and organize the new site.

In addition, the architects urged, and ultimately convinced, the City of Columbia to make this their first sustainable facility, setting the achieved goal of LEED Gold. As such, this project both provided an opportunity to revitalize a deteriorated, post-suburban commercial corridor, adjacent to a struggling residential neighborhood, and set the standard for sustainable practices for future City-owned projects.

Echoing its original function, the showroom location is repurposed as the only facility accessible to the public, as the Administration building with a conference room that doubles as a community room. In its new iteration, the Administration building is conceived as a simple glass prism, utilizing ceramic frit and perforated aluminum sunscreens at the exterior curtain wall to modulate light. Offices wrap the exterior, with a modular glazed partition system admitting daylight fully through the building. At the north-facing lobby, a south-facing linear light monitor penetrates a vegetated roof to pull direct sunlight into the space. Lighting on sensors throughout the building is designed to respond efficiently to changes in light levels, for daylight harvesting. An exterior composite wood rain screen lines the inside face of each of the three entries, providing a warm contrast to the otherwise restrained glass and steel exterior, introducing at the exterior a primary feature of the interior wood palette integrated into the partition system.

The three warehouse buildings at the rear of the site remain essentially warehouses and garages for equipment, vehicles and fleet maintenance, with offices for crews and technicians who spend most of their time in the field. Reskinned, the buildings are clad predominately in vertically seamed aluminum siding, subtly acknowledging the mullion pattern on the Administration building. Recessed clearstories and louvers at the eaves create a break between walls and the characteristically low-sloped roofs, expressing the roofs as a series of folded planes in response to the dramatically sloping site.

Prior to construction, the site, which slopes north to the adjacent neighborhood, was covered entirely in asphalt and was 100% impervious, creating erosion and flooding. In addition to rehabilitating this former Brownfield site, the site design included milling and reusing the existing asphalt, while also reducing total site imperviousness by more than 30%. Eighty-three percent of construction waste was recycled, and water use was reduced by 40% through a combination of xeriscaping and efficient fixtures. In addition to the extrinsic vegetated roof on the Administration building, the site includes six rain gardens and pervious hardscape. A variety of native trees have been placed throughout the site to provide a nearly continuous canopy of shade as they mature.