The 34,500 sf Austin Children’s Museum is to be located in a new planned community in Austin Texas. The core and shell and key public spaces will be built for a budget of $6.5M requiring some ingenuity to create gracious public spaces and create strong connections to the developing community. Koning Eizenberg’s role is to facilitate evolving exhibit design while keeping the big picture intact to ensure a, flexible, durable building that offers a seamless experience for visitors upon opening and over the longterm.
The Children’s Museum is a casual place that was designed to have cross generational appeal to encourage intergenerational learning. Consequently this building is not cute and capitalizes on the particular local climate and informal lifestyle to engage the public. The entry is marked by a deep cantilevering overhang to provide shade for the glassy entry and space for lingering. The interior is organized around a second level wood bridge that is the spine for exhibits (indoor and out) and vertical circulation.
Julie Eizenberg and Hank Koning worked together with the client group to develop a synthesized high performance approach that generated a distinctive and responsive building form and inviting public spaces. Schematic design is complete and we are now progressing into design development with our local executive architect STG. Sustainability objectives are currently LEED silver given the budget. Nevertheless the key design concept was framed by inventively addressing onsite water management, daylighting, exterior shade (deep overhang, west shade support “scaffold”, and perforated building face screens).
