Kennedy & Violich Revive a Disused Colorado Ice Enviornment as a Gentle-Crammed Arts Hub

When Sheila Kennedy and J. Frano Violich, founding principals of Boston-based Kennedy & Violich Structure (KVA), first stepped inside Honnen Ice Enviornment, they have been startled by what they noticed. Situated on the campus of Colorado School, a small liberal-arts faculty in Colorado Springs, the constructing—a thin-shell concrete construction from 1963—had sat unused for a number of years after the development of a brand new area for the college’s Division I hockey group. The constructing, designed by native observe Lusk & Wallace, was darkish, dank, and mildewy. The sector’s 80-foot-high ceiling vaults had been coated with foil-faced batt insulation. Daylight barely penetrated the rows of slender, fiber-reinforced plastic home windows, which had yellowed with age. No marvel the school had as soon as thought of demolishing the constructing.

The school’s new dwelling for 3D arts (high of web page, at proper) was constructed as a hockey rink (above) and is comprised of repeating thin-shell vaults like its adjoining natatorium (high of web page, at left). Photograph courtesy Colorado School Archives, click on to enlarge.

“You’ll have give up on the spot if you happen to had seen what it regarded like,” says Violich, who shortly noticed the constructing’s potential for reuse. The ceiling, particularly, captured the architect’s creativeness. “I instantly considered Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Artwork Museum,” Violich says. “There’s one thing monumental a few vaulted house like that.”

Kennedy, too, imagined prospects. “With adaptive reuse,” she says, “you have got to have the ability to take a look at the long run. You’ll be able to’t simply cease and be happy with the prevailing circumstances. It must be transformative.”

It has been. After a $5.5 million renovation, the ice area has turn out to be Honnen Arts, a 29,000-square-foot facility for 3D-arts choices. Mockingly, the school’s earlier 3D-arts workshop—an ’80s-era concrete-block constructing a lot beloved by college students and school—was situated on the location of the brand new hockey area, which opened in 2020. When the workshop was demolished, this system needed to make do with short-term quarters, together with a conveyable classroom. Some fabrication gear was put in storage for a number of years. Name it poetic justice that the 3D-arts program’s new location is the hockey group’s outdated dwelling.

Given the mission’s modest funds, KVA’s design technique was to retain many of the constructing’s exterior options whereas specializing in the huge inside house. “One in all our fundamental concerns, and challenges,” Kennedy says, “was to protect the distinctive spatial character of these massive, free-span vaults.” The architects added a brand new, recessed entry at a distinguished street-facing nook, utilizing a reddish-orange paint scheme as a wayfinding sign. Inside, within the house as soon as occupied by the ice rink and bleachers, are work desks, lecture rooms, workplaces, new bogs, and a versatile gallery house. Kennedy and Violich employed the identical reddish-orange colour used on the entrance to create an inside “avenue” that results in the enclosed workshops. Painted flooring areas mimic the curves of the barrel vaults, an effort to present the constructing a brand new public id. “All people knew the constructing as a hockey rink,” Kennedy says. “How do you now make it often known as the 3D-arts hub?”

The retailers embrace gear for woodworking, metallic fabrication, 3D printing, laser slicing, and CNC milling. A storage door on the west finish of the store house results in a fenced-off space containing kilns and a blacksmith forge.

When Honnen Enviornment first opened, the rink was open to the air on its sides; the vaulted concrete construction was designed as a pavilion to supply shade for the ice rink. (An identical constructing, Schlessman Natatorium, was constructed subsequent door.) In some unspecified time in the future, nevertheless, the rink was totally enclosed by concrete partitions, stacked terra-cotta tubes, and people plastic home windows. KVA created a way of transparency by changing the west-facing ceramic tubes and outdated home windows with insulated glazing, permitting daylight to fill the inside areas. (As a result of the vaults overhang by 12 ft or so, little or no direct daylight enters the constructing.) You’ll be able to even catch a glimpse of Pikes Peak if you happen to flip round simply inside the doorway and look to the west.

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The architects took full benefit of the lofty vaults within the lecture rooms (3 & 4) and all through the constructing. Images © Frank Ooms

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KVA swapped out the prevailing fluorescent lights for energy-efficient fixtures that grasp from the apex of the barrel vaults, benefiting from the curved ceiling’s reflective qualities.

As a substitute of a standard—and dear—climate-control system, the constructing makes use of displacement air flow, with conditioned air distributed from flooring stage at low velocities. The system additionally depends on Colorado’s high-altitude, low-humidity local weather to purge heat air in a single day whereas bringing in cooler out of doors air. (Colorado Springs, at 6,035 ft above sea stage, is even increased in elevation than mile-high Denver.)

For now, Honnen stays unfinished, with a number of inside areas empty and blocked off. KVA has drawn up plans for a second section that might flip these rooms into extra studios, lecture rooms, and school workplaces. The plan additionally requires a mezzanine, making a “Heart for Creativity & Innovation” with extra gallery house and pupil gathering areas, and workplaces, studios, and assembly rooms under.

Artwork professor Scott Johnson, who supervises the power, nonetheless laments the lack of the outdated 3D workshop, however he’s delighted this system has a brand new dwelling in a particular Twentieth-century constructing. “The cathedral-like areas are so conducive to inventive work,” he says. Repurposing an current constructing, he provides, is in line with the school’s sustainability efforts. (In 2020, Colorado School grew to become the primary Rocky Mountain–area establishment to attain carbon neutrality.) “It’s a dwelling instance of what we do right here.”