ACC Rio Grande featured in Global Design News
Honoring the neighborhood’s historic character, Austin Community College Rio Grande Campus renovation by Studio8 Architects and Overland Partners adds occupant comfort, safety, and well-being through sustainable building practices.
In Association with Studio8 Architects, Overland Partners and landscape architects dwg have completed the comprehensive renovation of Building 1000 that embodies and supports ACC’s vision, mission, and core values and is designed for long-term, sustainable evolution.
A revered Austin landmark and registered historic site, it enjoys a rich heritage of community education.
The renovation builds on this legacy as a flagship campus for ACC and a leading center of post-secondary learning in Texas.
More than a historic preservation project, the team was charged with reimagining the 108-year-old building to create a 21st-century campus that inspires, educates, enriches, and prepares students from diverse backgrounds for success.
ACC’s Rio Grande Campus Renovation has been awarded a 2023 American Architecture Award from The Chicago Athenaeum and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
The enclosure of two exterior lightwells was a major intervention that transformed the facility, turning this previously underutilized building into a light-filled public commons across four levels with equal access to natural sunlight.
Atria are capped with a translucent ETFE roof system, allowing sunlight to penetrate the now-conditioned space below that mimics being outside.
This change not only provided a structurally innovative solution to enclosing the atria, but addressed student, staff, and faculty well-being and opened the building for better circulation.
Where the original building had dead-end corridors, unused exterior space, boarded-up windows, and a challenged mechanical system, the renovated campus prioritizes connected learning, circulation, and daylight equity.
A 169-seat Accelerator Lab, campus library, and Army Futures Software Factory create the campus’s central engine.
Six high-tech science labs, classrooms for Gallaudet University’s deaf and hard-of-hearing students, study areas, and a cafeteria are situated around this engine for an activated, mixed-use campus.
The project achieved LEED Platinum status, due in large part to the preservation and reuse of the existing structure, and access to daylight, recycled water systems, low-e glass, eco-conscious finishes, chilled beam mechanical system, and sustainable sites initiatives for positive daily impact on end-users and low cost per square foot.
This renovation breathed new life into the Rio Grande campus. Classrooms, labs, and office spaces are now open and adaptable, suiting changing needs, and solar readiness of the roof allows ACC to pivot power production capacity.
The project addresses the ever-changing landscape of post-secondary education itself, allowing for continued learning in a future-forward facility with the well-being of its users at its core.
With these renovations, ACC Rio Grande is positioned to educate, enrich, and prepare students with high-quality, affordable post-secondary learning opportunities and to continue serving the greater Austin community for decades to come.
Project: Austin Community College (ACC) Rio Grande Campus Renovation
Architects: Overland Partners
Architects of Record: Studio8 Architects
Historic Preservation Architects: Architexas and Hutson Gallagher LLC.
Original Architect: Dennis R. Walsh (1916)
Landscape Architects: dwg
General Contractor: Bartlett Cocke General Contractors
Client: Austin Community College District
Photographers: Dror Baldinger
Original article can be found here.
