Title: Watauga Community Recreation Center
Location of Proejct: Boone, NC
Project Completion Date: May 2020
Firm Name: Clark Nexsen

Short Description: A 95,000sf recreation center for Watauga County, North Carolina offers four gymnasiums, suspended running track, competition pool, leisure pool, multipurpose rooms, and fitness facilities. The L-shaped building houses pools in one leg and gymnasiums in the other and the two wings are joined by a glazed lobby that contains reception and waiting. Irregular peaks and valleys of the center’s roof echo the undulating ridgelines of the surrounding mountains. Stone cladding references an Appalachian vernacular while generous use of curtain wall provides interior daylighting and views in, to the pools, and out, to the adjacent athletic fields and mountains beyond.

Architect's Statement: The project’s completion marks the culmination of decades of effort by Watauga County to upgrade its recreational facilities. The building is situated at the intersection of Hunting Hills Lane and State Farm Road and defines the site’s conventionally understood street front. Ample parking is placed well inboard of the site’s edges and serves the new recreation center and the existing athletic fields and playground. A landscaped path bisects the parking area and fills a gap in a pre-existing neighborhood greenway. Echoing the surrounding ridgelines, the undulating roof form, clad in grey standing seam metal, provides the primary architectural gesture and unifies the overall composition of the new building. A kinked wall at the one-story stone-clad administration wing refers, architecturally, to the creased roofline and houses offices and support spaces for the center’s directors and staff. “Gasketing” the gymnasium wing and the natatorium, a two-story glazed lobby, articulated by a notch in the unifying roof form, denotes the main entrance and houses a monumental stair, reception and waiting, and a fitness area at the upper level. The vertically oriented modulation of the standing seam metal wall panels is reiterated by the vertical fins of the curtain wall, offering a directional counterpoint to the building’s predominantly horizontal massing. An intentionally monotone color palette reinforces the building’s underlying abstract nature and accentuates the sculptural aspects of its massing. Highlighting the main entrances, wood-lined fissures in the adhered stone walls are defined along their bottom edges by cantilevered ipe benches. Ipe is reiterated at the soffit of a slender entrance canopy, at the reception desk, and at the walls and ceiling of a spectator seating area overlooking the main competition pool. An upper level suspended running track is routed along the edges of the gymnasium wing and into the lobby’s upper level encircling the center’s weight training and fitness facilities. The track tangentially engages the natatorium via a glass wall offering views across the ipe-lined spectator seating area to the competition pool beyond and stitches together the recreation center’s major programmatic elements.