Career Technical Building

Copiah-Lincoln Community College

Mendenhall, Mississippi

The New Simpson County Center Career Technical Building Addition expands a rural college building with classroom and technology/lab space organized as three wings around two courtyards. The southerly existing building conceals the addition from the campus entrance, in-forming new safe and inviting east and west entrances at rear of campus. A sunlit lobby at west side, and shops at east, anchor the plan, with layered screening cascading and directing the path from east parking. The new form, alongside existing north-reaching wings, creates a central courtyard negotiating steep existing grading. A secondary courtyard sits between west and north classroom wings, extended by an elevated lawn framing views to woods.

Subtly responding to existing structure, the addition is also constructed of brick and guttered sloping metal roofs, and abstracted to respond to the rural landscape by form and materials, with roofs sometimes turning vertical into walls, reimagining local agrarian construction. The existing metal hip roofs revisit the site as monoslopes, draining efficiently away from the courtyard. Simple box gutters reimagine with steeper slopes, underlapping, delicately hanging, dancing along elevations, vividly shadowing. The existing entrance tower now abstracts north of the new lobby, a planar brick elevation proportioned by an adjacent sliver window, extruded into a rectangular solid with clerestoreys, “supported” by a glassed east end. This light tower and bright adjacent lobby pivot classroom wings around the north courtyard. Glass planes layer and cross-reference all around, up and down. A sunlit corridor extends east to a light-pierced high porch with thin steel columns and corrugated metal agricultural siding, protecting exterior shop and lab entrances. The economical and sturdy building envelope maximizes energy efficiency in its assemblies, providing daylight-ing throughout. Sustainable materials include ever-durable masonry, high recycled content ceilings, zero-low-VOC coatings, and durable low-maintenance floors.

Total area: 23,412 G.S.F.
Square foot cost: $250.00
Total cost: $6 million
Winner 2020 AIA Merit Award