Johnson Band Center

Project Details

Project Description

This marching band facility is located adjacent to UNC Charlotte’s iconic School of Architecture, Storrs Hall, designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates in 1988. Departing from the predominant neo-traditional campus architecture, the exterior expression is a composition of abstracted planes and interlocking volumes, consistent with Gwathmey Siegel’s work of the period, in counterpoint to Storrs’ bands of color and punched openings. Through placement, orientation and program simplification, the building also redefines a previously ill-defined outdoor space, creating an event lawn, terminating Storrs’ primary axis. A monumental canopy simultaneously shades the main west-facing façade and provides a stage for outdoor performances.

Conceived by the client as a pre-engineered storage facility for the university’s fledgling marching band, this modest structure was to be placed on a back-of-house lot in the corner of campus, immediately adjacent to the service yard of the School of Architecture, Storrs Hall, and across from Robinson Hall for the Performing Arts.

Presented with an underutilized site and a well-defined program, however, the design team recognized an opportunity to solve a variety of existing site problems, while both reducing the size of the building, and creating an appropriate home for the marching band.

By consolidating various storage spaces into one and simplifying the program, a large multi-purpose space was created. Lockers for instrument storage were placed prominently within the open space, freestanding, to define circulation. By pulling support functions to the north and faculty offices to the south, the central space became the building’s defining feature, reinforced by an expanse of curtainwall under a deep entry canopy.

Placed at the eastern edge of the site, facing west, the Band Center now both screened Storrs’ service yard and anchored a broad lawn, suitable for viewing outdoor band performances under the canopy. What had been an awkward terminus to Storrs’ primary organizing axis, an unused back door leading nowhere, was now a well-defined destination.

Architecturally, the band center responds to Storrs Hall, in plan, massing and façade composition. The last modernist structure to be built on campus, designed by New York City –based Gwathmey Siegel & Associates in the late 1980’s, Storrs stands in contrast to the neo-traditional architecture of recent campus buildings, a notable example of which is Robinson Hall. Both the architecture faculty and the design team felt it was important to acknowledge the architectural legacy Storrs embodied, in the design of the Band Center.

To that end, the floor plan is developed through a reductivist approach. A simple rectangle is broken down geometrically, defining the building’s interior, in response to both program and site. Straightforward, flexible interiors reflect the building’s utilitarian function. Instrument storage lockers further define the plan, and certain stored items, such as uniforms and large instruments, when stored, are permanently “on display” as artifacts reflecting the building’s function.

While Storrs’ facades are primarily organized as bands of color, punched openings, and discreet masses, the Band Center is developed as a more abstract composition of planes and interlocking volumes, but within the same color palette as Storrs. A horizontal datum aligns with the top of Storrs’ red masonry base, and is expressed continuously and alternately on the Band Center as a reveal, window head and clerestory sill. By taking this approach, the perceived scale of the significantly smaller Band Center also becomes compatible with that of the much larger Storrs Hall. The design team also recognized that this compositional strategy was consistent with many of Gwathmey Siegel’s buildings designed concurrently with Storrs. The intent – and the hope of the architects – is that the resulting design is not only respectful of its neighbor but responds appropriately to its celebrated architect’s late-twentieth century modernist polemic, thereby reinforcing a sense of dialogue between the two buildings, both physically and across generations.