Columbus Community College, Columbus, Indiana

Abstract

The Columbus Community College is an educational institution that focuses its energy on providing life-long educational opportunities for all citizens of the community which it serves.The college consists of roughly 125,000 gross square feet and consists of a theatre, library, bookstore, cafeteria, administration, three types of classrooms, two types of laboratories, faculty offices, and a physical plant. It has five main departments in the first phase which are secretarial administration, general business, agribusiness. industrial technology, and alternative energy. The first phase will serve approximately 2,000 students and the second phase will increase the capacity by an additional 2,000 students and 100,000 square feet of classrooms and labs.The site is a near northeast site in the city of Columbus, Indiana. The most dominating issue of the site are the existing trees which are of a few basic varieties with their average total height of seventy-five feet. They cover the entire southern portion of the site, and the northern portion is relatively barren and open to the surrounding industrial context. The main access to the site is along the southern edge which is state road 46, or 25th street as it runs through town.The project evolved through a rather intense period of alternate research and design concept thinking. It is a very unique project which is a result of the question which case out of the synthesis and compilation of all the research that was done. This question involves the search for a synergistic serendipity or perhaps the discovery of some way to have organized chaos.The plan is very irregular, though every exact angle designed with the "wind's eye" by a continuous placement in the space itself, mainly through model form and sheer imagination. The scheme is basically a series of smaller buildings which are maintained in a linear fashion along an Interior pedestrian street. This street "meanders" its way through the "building" and relies on the magnet approach used in many shopping malls to provide the everyday traffic generation along the street.Along this street there are four nodes which consist of two types and two orientations. The piazza at the "student center" serves as the major internal oriented node as it is nearest the least desirable Industrial context. The open plaza at the other end of the street serves as the major external oriented node as the buildings which frame it split apart to allow two of the existing trees to nestle between them. Between these' two major nodes are two minor nodes, one internal which occurs at the center of the street end bridges the two sides together, and one external oriented that serves as the main public "guest" entry.The facades of the building are based on a concept termed "dynamic syncopation" which essentially is an ever-increasing rythymic pattern of the ornament and often the window openings themselves. The "front" image is that of a loggia that is strung along the entire south facade of the classrooms. This facade borrows from the Creek image of frontal as public. The interior circulation facades separate the balcony walkways which link the entire classroom clusters from the street and their opening frequency and ornamentation increase as the plazas, or "student center" is approached. The buildings on the south side of the street are lowered below grade one level to allow the sun to penetrate the street space through an "arcade for the sun". The north exterior facade also deals with the increasing rythym of ornamentation and has window openings that are relatively small due to their northern orientation.The materials used consist of rectangular glass block,used in a running bond,on the south exterior facade and on the actual classroom facades. Limestone with brick masonry trim is used on the north exterior facades and the student center and the interior circulation facades are painted drywall on concrete block. Limestone panels are used extensively throughout the interior facades at the student center.The building's pedestrian street is roofed with two different materials. Over the classroom areas the roof is opaque as the light is provided by the sun arcade from the south. Over the most public spaces is glass, over the piazza is a glass dome and arch barrel vaults radiate from it down their respective streets.The basic structure is masonry unit bearing t. walls which support the balcony walkways as well as the roof trusses at the classrooms, and at the student center a column and slab construction is used. The systems which generate from the physical plant are distributed along the systems tunnel that runs beneath the interior street to all buildings in the college.The whole experience of the spaces, both interior and exterior, is meant to be a movement not only through space, but also through time, as the dynamic syncopation attempts to do. This atmosphere set forth by the informal character of the interior street is to be condusive to the interaction among the students, faculty. and staff, i.e. the community, to relax the formal social attitude normally created in such an institution.