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By Elizabeth Fazzare
In downtown Colorado Springs, Colorado, a scaly spiral design came out of a slightly triangular site surrounded by commercial buildings on two sides and a small backyard with rails on the other. Olympic enthusiasts know the municipality (approximately 472,000 people) as Olympic City USA, home to the headquarters of the Olympic and Paralympic Committees, where more than 15,000 athletes exercise each year in the hope of forming members of the U.S. team. Today, it is also a permanent home to the first Olympic and Paralympic museum in the United States. Designed through the New York architecture company Diller Scofidio-Renfro, whose newest cultural assignment was the expansion of the Museum of Modern Art, the universally available museum now open to the public in the center of a mature city for urban intensification.
The new U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Museum is divided into two structures on an expanded campus: the museum and a construction containing a café, a theater, and a space for occasions. An amphitheatre of herbs and a square separate them.
With Team USA at the center of the museum’s 60,000-square-foot collection and programming, accessibility is an integral component of bidirectional design. On the one hand, the commission had as an urban mission “connecting the city with itself”, explains Benjamin Gilmartin, component of Diller Scofidio-Renfro, and make cozy an inaccessible place. On the other hand, it meant the creation of a museum where other people of all talents can simply access, scale and enjoy the cultural area along the same paths.
To create an urban access, the design team looked away from the site. Through the aforementioned concentration of railways is America the Beautiful Park and a fair opportunity to create an urban space from a green space. Although the museum hopes to consolidate the surrounding developments, the architects “knew that we would be alone on the site for a while and therefore, when visitors arrive, they will have to reach a complete place, an enveloping landscape and a public space.” “he explains. Therefore, the site is rather a small campus, with two structures, the museum and the café/space for events/theater, separated through a square where a synthetic elevation replacement creates an amphitheater. From the most sensitive of this square, the architecture company has designed a bridge to the existing park. “The desire to climb across the bridge has been a preference to create a more sensitive graphic context around the museum, a green environment to slightly alleviate the noise of the railways,” Gilmartin explains about the structure, which will be completed in September and opened in December.
The site is adjacent to a railroad backyard where a imaginable Diller Scofidio-Renfro bridge will provide access to an existing park.
To create architectural access, they designed the entire museum as a narrative ramp. From the outside, the shape of a three-story spiral is perceived under the aluminum panel facade formed by 9,000 unique diamond-shaped folded anodized panels. Inside, 12 petal galleries from a 40-foot-high central atrium where 4 viewpoints assist consulting visitors as they descend. The clear-passing windows between the gallery draw sunlight into the atrium and create glass-marked bars on the outside.
A look at the interior of the museum. While some of the interiors will allow for ample natural light to stream in, other parts will be darker to allow for a better experience.
The contents of the museum itself, which includes exhibits on the history of the games, as well as artifacts, and which will house the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Hall of Fame, is also universally displayed. Using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Gallagher Associates interactive displays create a generalized-use delight for each guest and are designed to be enjoyed at multiple height levels, which in the classic case that would possibly be inaccessible to one wheelchair or other user. “The mix of universal and highly individualized delight works well to create a highly inclusive museum,” says Gilmartin, whose design was guided through the councils of Olympic and Paralympic athletes on the museum’s board of directors.
Interactive displays, including alpine skiing (pictured), will be available to the public.
In the other aspect of the outdoor square, the secondary design covered with a green roof emerges from seasonal topography designed through DS-R in collaboration with local landscaping company NES and landscapers Hargreaves Jones, founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In view, there is a flexible theater with enough dominance to accommodate 26 wheelchairs (the price of an entire Olympic hockey team), a mastery of occasions with panoramic perspectives and a 500-square-foot terrace, a coffee and a school center, and a convention room with views of the Rocky Mountains. Here, designing a domain that is both avant-garde, inclusive and ecologically contextual, Gilmartin explains. And as always, he celebrates the American team: “The landscape brings to the site the mountain ecology of the meadows, forests and alps,” he explains. “And their adjustments speak to the importance of the seasons for the Olympic and Paralympic Games.”
The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Museum will open in Colorado Springs, a city for visiting athletes, an opportunity for everyone to celebrate the country’s physical athletes. According to Tommy Schield, director of marketing and communications at the museum, “for 40 years, champions have lived and trained in Olympic City USA, and now their stories and legacies will live here forever.”
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