Program: A single-story, 30,000-square-foot headquarters for the Livestrong Foundation, with office space, meeting rooms, a courtyard, a gym, and a resource center for cancer patients. Located in East Austin, the facility is an adaptive reuse of a concrete tilt-up paper warehouse built in the 1950s.
Design concept and solution: Charged with designing an open-plan office for the foundation, the architects needed to convert what was essentially a big, uninsulated storage box into a workspace for people. They also faced the challenge of bringing daylight into the space, since lot-line and other restrictions prevented windows from being added to all but one side of the building. On the north end of the structure, Lake | Flato removed the middle portion of the exterior wall. To give the once-stark warehouse an inviting street presence, the firm added a landscaped entry court with a steel canopy, which overhangs a new glazed entrance recessed from the building edge. To bring northern light further into the building, the architects opened up a central section of the roof and inserted sawtooth clerestory windows. They remilled the leftover roof decking and, in homage to the building's former life, turned it into wood-plank office enclosures reminiscent of shipping crates. The crates—wood on three sides, glass on the front—are scattered in an ad-hoc arc around the entire office. The arc defines a circulation path through the space, like a main street stitching together the houses of a village.
Completion Date: March 2009
Owner:
Livestrong Foundation
Architect:
Lake | Flato Architects
311 Third St.
San Antonio, TX 78205
Tel: 210.227.3335
Fax: 210.224.9515
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