Title: Coast Guard Base Command Center Charleston
Location of Proejct: North Charleston, SC
Project Completion Date: May 7, 2022
Firm Name:

Short Description: The Base Command Center for the US Coast Guard is found in North Charleston, SC. It's an office building that addresses the social needs of a changing work environment as well as the environmental needs of a changing climate with rising sea levels. Our design centers itself around facilitating relationships and occupant well-being. It does this by focusing on the individual users' health and by operating community zones at these scales: base, building cluster, building, floor, and human. A performative skin utilizing natural and artificial canopies, among other sustainable strategies, prepares the building for success over the next hundred years.

Architect's Statement: The client for this project was the United States Coast Guard. The site is found in North Charleston, SC which is a warm humid climate which is expected to have a dramatic change in sea level over the next one hundred years. By this time the site is expected to be regularly flooded or underwater. Our project is expected to meet the needs of the Coast Guard of today and the Coast Guard of a hundred years from now. The building responds to the changing social needs of the contemporary office building and environmental needs of an oppressive environment.

The Base Command Center is built in response to the placement and program found in in the adjacent Sector Command Center. Our design centers itself around facilitating relationships and occupant well-being. It is broken up into two zones: business and education. The intermediary space between these zones is an exterior atrium the carries the language from the greenway to the inside of the building.

The performative skin and roof system is set up to combat the harsh, humid climate of Charleston. Solar gain is minimized during the summer while still having many windows and access to the northeastern sky. By utilizing the natural patterns found in foliage, the western façade will become more shaded during the summer and allow more solar gain during the winter when the natural canopy sheds its leaves. Water collection occurs on the sawtooth roof and is collected in the cisterns on the ground level with the overflow water returning to the site/city. Natural ventilation occurs through the double skin façade and the atrium which establishes a buffer zone from the southern and western sun. Additionally, operable windows on the western side of the roof's system open to allow hot air to be removed from the building. Formally, the skin uses vertical louvres to establish privacy around the governmental office. A change in depth of those louvres open the views to the more public spaces of the office. When looking at the building from an oblique angle, the interior of the building if blocked, but from a more direct angle the office is revealed. As you travel beside the building, different zones of the office are revealed and concealed with the more public zones being revealed earlier by the changes in louvre depth.

Community zones were set up by establishing mimicry across multiple scales. The Coast Guard initially offered a green corridor that cuts across the entire base, creating a central location of play and wayfinding. We developed a greenway which has offshoots of communal gathering spaces as well as wayfinding at a smaller scale for our master site. Between the Base Command Center and Sector Command Center is a courtyard which promotes fraternization between the buildings as well as connecting useful programs to each other outside of the flood plain. Between the education and business zones is the atrium which facilitates movement and gathering. Lastly, the human scale has multiple instances where people will gather in smaller groups. All of these scales have elements that reference each other visually, physically, or formally. By doing this, our users have constant access to nature, light, and community. The intent behind this move is to simplify the use and discovery of different spaces throughout the entire site. Going from a large community scale to a smaller community scale offers the opportunity for more intimate settings, but the opposite offers the opportunity for larger gatherings. The Coast Guard meets in many different groups which needs different level of privacy. We gave them the ability to adapt to these spaces as they need over the next one hundred years.