HONNEN ARTS HUB
Students need workplaces where they can innovate and work freely with a wide range of materials, using analog and computational tools. Schools have aging modern era concrete buildings that don’t meet building or energy codes, with significant embodied carbon. HONNEN ART HUB's vision connects both concerns, creating new opportunities for hands-on learning within a very minimal budget. The design adapts and re-uses an abandoned ice hockey rink (1961), engaging it’s 80’ clear span concrete vault structure to create a carbon negative, accessible new 30,000 SF Arts Hub with a large fabrication shop, foundry, kilns, studio classrooms, offices and a gallery for making and exhibitions.
Reusing this existing concrete structure preserves 1,615 Tons of embodied carbon. This project exemplifies an impactful approach to adaptive design where the biggest perceived ‘problem’ of an existing building is transformed to serve community needs. The design reimagines the rink’s seemingly immutable concrete vaults as a layered spatial system that organizes the program, shades western light, provides mountain views, brings in natural light, and serves as enormous ‘fixtures’ that reflect indirect light onto workspaces below. The provision of a new transparent enclosure brings new visibility to the Arts at Colorado College and connects high bay Studio and Workshop spaces with outdoor work yards along a major Campus Pedestrian Corridor.
The concrete vault structure inspires a visible, affordable design language of curves and arcs that unifies the Hub’s new transparent exterior and interior partitions. Pops of color provide placemaking and human scale, treating no-VOC paint as an impactful minimal material that reflects the red sandstone of the surrounding high plains. The new public entry at a prominent urban corner gains visibility with color and transparency in a new glazed exterior envelope. The design creates an accessible public circulation system by linking two existing campus levels with a phased mezzanine and elevator.
Date: 2025
Status: Completed
Client: Colorado College
Location: Colorado Springs, CO
Design Team:
Frano Violich, FAIA; Managing Principal
Sheila Kennedy, FAIA; Principal Consulting on Design
Ben Widger, AIA; Project Architect
Nick Johnson, AIA; Lead Designer
Daniel Sebaldt, RA, Katie Koskey; Project Designers
Architect: Kennedy & Violich Architecture, Ltd.
Structural: HCDA Structural
MEP Engineer: Farris Engineering MEP
Construction: GH Phipps Construction