For our 603 studio, we were tasked with creating an art gallery/civic center for the downtown of Bryan, Texas. Bryan is a very small city, and sits directly next to College Station, Texas. Although the downtown is very small, it has a very distinct vernacular, complete with older style brick buildings. The site was an existing parking lot in that sits near the train tracks; despite the parking lots optimal location, it was far too big for the needs of Bryan’s downtown, and so it was chosen as the site for our studio to design on. The program for the building was relatively relaxed and simple, with requirements for gallery space and for an auditorium and some office space. The most significant challenge of the design ended up being ADA requirements for the building. For Bryan, code would have required two elevators and two fire stairs for this building. If the building was large enough, this would not be an issue, but for a small lot gallery building such as this, doubling the elevator and stairs would have significantly impacted the budget and design of the building. In order to keep to one stair and one elevator, a ramp was necessary for the design.

After running the numbers, ADA code would require quite a large ramp, so large that it would have to span nearly half the site to meet slope requirements. Seeing this as an opportunity more so than a challenge, the ramp was made to be an integral part of the gallery, similar in scope to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. The ramp was made rectilinear in this case, wrapping three stories up a steel skeleton atrium in the center. The ramp was made much wider than required by code in order to function as a grand procession space that hugs the walls of brick and concrete. The steel skeleton in the center not only allows for this grand ramp to be supported structurally, but also serves as a sort of scaffolding in which art can be hung and displayed in the atrium. The ramp itself becomes the main building, in a way, with the rest of the program sitting in a different building. The entire project is one building, but it is made clear that the ramp is on top of the hierarchy and that the rest of the building is treated with restraint, comparatively. The result makes for a sort of restrained icon for downtown Bryan; the building clearly has a gimmick, but it is one that is pulled off with simplicity and respect to the city’s downtown.