AIA National 2021 Small Project Award Winner

Blalock & Partners approached the client with a message of maximizing the available budget with a simple, yet dramatic, design approach, while also being more sustainable and environmentally responsible. At the initial kick-off meeting, the Team talked of the embodied energy associated with the construction and transport of a pre-engineered building solution, as well as the energy used to heat and cool the large volume of unused overhead space inherent in those structures. Perhaps of more importance was avoiding the quantity of waste – over four and a half million pounds of concrete and asphalt – destined for a landfill. By leaving the building’s structure of pre-cast concrete tees, the design solution could still achieve energy performance levels beyond that required for code compliance, as well as breathe a new 50-year life-span into an existing building and avoid unnecessary waste.

From a design aesthetic perspective, the firm assured the Fire Department that they could achieve a dynamic new civic façade and inviting, day-lit workspaces by utilizing and manipulating the station’s 1960’s-era structural shell. This area, along the city’s western edge, is a haphazard assemblage of urban industrial development spanning several decades. The raw, utilitarian nature of this context, and the restrictive construction budget, informed the material choices for the project.

Utilizing the building’s pre-cast concrete tee structure, the architects developed a cost-effective cladding strategy that created texture, depth and movement, while also providing a double skin that both helps cool the building and shade openings. The architects researched raw steel sheet metal products to understand the most cost-effective and readily-available standard sizes. From there, they developed two cladding widths of the same height. The two panel widths are each bent, folded and shaped into a “panel module”. Each panel module can be rotated 180 degrees as well as perforated, allowing a variation of as many as eight different module profiles & textures across the façade. The “offcuts” of the original steel panels were utilized in soffits and fascia panels at canopies denoting public and private entry points.

To further establish the building with the SLC Fire Department identity, the architects painted the cladding “fire engine red” and treated the existing building shell with a muted grey paint as a backdrop to both the dynamic cladding and a new water-conscious landscape scheme.  

As an administrative and recruit training center, the Department’s programmatic requirements were simple: a handful of private offices, a small, collaborative work space, two recruit training rooms, a small break room, a conference space and the Apparatus Bay used for training. Working with the structural limitations of the concrete tee structure, the Design Team lengthened existing window locations and strategically carved new openings working with the new office layout and allowing more natural light to enter the shared work spaces.  Interior storefront systems were used to help filter daylight from private offices at the perimeter into the central areas, transforming what was once a dimly light cavernous space into a bright energetic environment. 

The cost effective, adaptive reuse has provided SLCFD a modern and functional Training Center, that is both a nod to the past and a vision to the future on what sustainable design can look like when creative ideas are entertained.