Homewood Flossmoor High School
Sports & Recreation Center Design
Community members, including athletes & casual fitness enthusiasts, benefit from this Recreation Center design including a 135,000 SF Field House and Entrance Atrium Addition. The dynamic LEED® Gold Certified facility is designed to host multiple events and practices at the same time. This means that participants in activities such as track, basketball, volleyball, wrestling, dance, football, soccer, lacrosse, field hockey, softball, baseball, cheerleading and aerobics will compete in their sport rather than with each other for facility space.
A Versatile & Dynamic Recreation Center Design
Overlooking the Field House is a 9,000 SF Fitness Facility, featuring state of the art cardio and training equipment. In addition to this fitness center, is the new Athletic Director office suite, making this area the new program hub.
The 30,000 SF synthetic turf Auxiliary Gym extends the season for a variety of field sports, promising the athletes an elite-level, competitive edge. This area includes full baseball and softball infields with drop down batting cages, a 35 yard field with a full end zone and striping for soccer, football, lacrosse and field hockey, along with shot put and discus. It boasts a 27 foot clear ceiling space for these activities to occur.
Along with the athletic spaces a number of ancillary spaces ensure that the facility functions properly including new coaches offices and locker rooms, team/community locker rooms, new public toilet facilities, multi-purpose team/class rooms and a dramatic increase in storage facilities in order to house all of the new equipment needed for the amount of activities that will take place.
The new entrance atrium creates a connection between the athletic facility and the rest of the building, which previously occurred through the locker rooms. Visitors now enter the building into a two story open space that celebrates the rich history of the District instead of directly into a corridor as it was previously. This space gives the community a place to meet and spend time, plus it creates an identity for the previously nondescript building. It also helps to address some severe accessibility, security and grading issues previously ignored.
The challenge of fitting a building of this size and scale into the context of both the community of neighboring homes that look directly at the facility and the context of the multi-building campus were considered through the design. The building itself is sited 4 – 5 feet below grade in order to reduce the overall size of the building. In addition, different scales of materials were used on the exterior to help reduce the perceived scale and monolithic look that these types of facilities often take on. This use of multiple materials was also employed to serve as a method of unifying the very different architectural styles that exist on the campus. The result is a facility that does not overwhelm the campus and appears to have been a part of the overall design all along.
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