Next-Generation Community Center

The project, which impressed the judges with its use of metal and transparency, was named the Overall Winner and Ribbed Metal Wall Panel category winner for the 2019 Metal Architecture Design Awards. Design Award Judge Charles Bloszies, FAIA, SE, LEED AP, principal, Office of Charles F. Bloszies FAIA Ltd., San Francisco, says he likes the different levels of translucency with the metal and the different fa.ades. “The shapes and how they’re interconnected and juxtaposed, it just seems to be really well conceived compositionally and then reinforced by the use of different levels of translucency in the metal.”

Judge Lewis McNeel, AIA, associate, Lake|Flato Architects, San Antonio, agrees, saying, “Seeing the different transparencies and different applications of ribbed metal panels in the same project, there’s a real careful, crisp playfulness going on, and the overall project, separate from the metal, is really compelling and really well executed.”

Judge Steven Ginn, founding principal of Steven Ginn Architects, Omaha, Neb., adds that the metal is used in a variety of creative and interesting ways. “It’s so integral to the overall design of the project. You can’t strip the metal from this and still have a building like this. It’s so much a part of it, and it’s such an excellent project in terms of variety and interest in terms of the way the project works with the hill.”

Innovative Urban Design Model

Josh Shelton, partner at architectural firm el dorado Inc., Kansas City, Mo., says they became involved in the project after meeting Othello Meadows, president and CEO of Seventy Five North Revitalization Corp., a non-profit community building organization in North Omaha. Along with Brinshore Development, Northbrook, Ill., whose expertise is tax-credit development, the two organizations had acquired 30 areas of land, and were looking into designing a purpose-built community with a variety of home ownership, rental and multigenerational options.

Along with the surrounding Highlander community, the Accelerator represents an innovative urban design model through its institutional/private sector partnerships that Shelton says seeks to confront and repair the social wrongs embedded in the history of segregation-based urban planning and policy of American cities.

With a vision of trying to create a self-sufficient and self-supporting community that was also eclectic and diverse, The Accelerator is a carefully curated and overlapping mix of business and organizations. Serving as the anchor of the community, Shelton calls it a next-generation community center, a hybrid project that combines and mashes up all different kinds of uses from small entrepreneurship to event space to urban agriculture to higher-end institutional.

“[The Accelerator’s] focus really is on helping with both youth and adult education initiatives, supporting small businesses and small local entrepreneurship, and celebrating the arts through supporting small culinary artists, and also educating people about healthy foods and local agricultural efforts,” Shelton explains.

Grace Broeder, AIA, project designer at el dorado, says Meadows really wanted it to be a place for the community. “He wanted it to be a place that people from downtown Omaha would come to and visit, just because of the quality of the space. So there’s a coffee shop and event venues that would become more of a destination within a larger city rather than only a community.”

Challenging Topography

The Accelerator sits on a section of land with a challenging sloping topography, and one of the challenges the designers faced was trying to figure out where the front door of the Accelerator should be. “In the first sketches of the building, there was no front façade and rear façade,” Shelton says. “Every façade was a front façade, which presented some challenges, such as where do you put loading/unloading.”

In trying to figure out how to organize the building program while still engaging its users, the designers used the sloping site to their advantage. The building itself is designed as an active retaining wall that provides both event space and green space on the upper level, as well as light industrial environments on the lower level. As such, each building elevation becomes the front elevation. “Once we embraced the idea of the front door being available to all sides of the building,” Shelton says, “then it serves to welcome the larger community from all directions.”

Broeder says that when it came to figuring out the building’s layout, she was learning about who was going to be in the building and what everybody needed. “We were trying to understand their relationship to the spaces and to daylight and entry,” she explains, “and were trying to make an organization that would work for all of the tenants, while leveraging and sharing utilities.”

“I think the perforated screening systems really helped open up the building on all façades, while still remaining responsible from a solar perspective,” she adds. “Access to the community space needed to be pretty open, and the shading systems really helped on the south side of the building to allow that to happen.”

Sustainable Goals

Shelton says that the design team had a list of sustainable goals they were trying to achieve, including mitigating solar heat gain, using ground-source heat pumps, and very smart strategies in terms of solar orientation.

To achieve some of these goals, the design team used a variety of metal siding and perforated metal panels. Bristol, Conn.-based Morin Corp. supplied approximately 31,000 square feet of its C-37 7/8 metal wall panel in both solid and perforated styles. The 0.040-inch-thick aluminum solid panels have a two-coat fluoropolymer finish on the exterior face. The custom-perforated panels have 1/8-inch holes at 3/16-inch spacing resulting in a 40 percent open area and have a two-coat fluoropolymer finish on both sides.

Metal wall panels were chosen for their combination of durability, economy, installation speed and timeless aesthetic quality. The perforated metal panels respond to local environmental conditions by protecting the south and western facades from solar heat gain, while still allowing an abundance of natural light into the building interior. At night, LED lighting showcases the perforated metal screens, while the building reveals a subtle depth to its layered façade.

An Once-in-a-Lifetime Project

As Shelton explains, the Highlander Accelerator is on one hand an inspiration to North Omaha and the community it serves, while also being inspired by the city and the community it serves. “It’s a place that people are proud of,” he says, “and the building was fully inspired by the community it serves.”

“Seventy-Five North is the only organization that could have pulled something like this off,” adds Shelton. “Their relationships with stakeholders and community partners in North Omaha run very deep. They also had a tremendous amount of support from mission-driven philanthropy in Omaha, and they had a great partner with Brinshore Development, and tax credit awards.”

“It’s really one of those once-in-a-lifetime projects that you don’t think is possible until you find yourself working on it, and then you just sort of feel very lucky to be along for the ride,” Shelton adds.