AIA NC Headquarters
Raleigh, North Carolina
This project was an entry for the AIA North Carolina Headquarters Design Competition. Created collaboratively with Hunter Paul Coffey Architecture, the scheme transforms a triangular site in downtown Raleigh into an urban garden. As such, the building acts as a small pavilion in the landscape, which celebrates its sustainable design and gives the site back to the public. Parking is provided below ground to keep cars and paved surfaces out of sight, while the habitable roof of the parking garage acts as a “main lawn” that accommodates public education, installations, and parties in the garden. The pavilion-like building has a sheltering roof and a front porch, which provides a passive solar design and is homage to the vernacular architecture inherent to much of North Carolina. Under the wood clad ceiling of the sheltering roof are two buildings: a super-insulated, conditioned box clad in corrugated metal that houses the AIA offices and an inhabitable brick wall, which serves as a thermal mass as well as contains a public gallery, circulation, and a lobby. Occupants and visitors constantly transition between both structures via open bridges, experiencing indigenous materials and building techniques in the hand-crafted civic building and modern sustainable design strategies in the high-performance office building; it is a dichotomous experience of North Carolina’s architectural past and future.
