Gateway Exchange is a 15,000 sf medical and retail center comprised of three buildings that form a large, landscaped courtyard. The project inverts the typical American retail typology of one large building surrounded by a sea of parking, creating a project that simultaneously explores exteriority and interiority. The exterior reads as one large urban project comprised of varied masses organized as a single object, while voids between buildings in the interior court create framed views to the surrounding site. Solid/void relationships, planarity, transparency, reflection, and proportionally moving datums inform the project’s formal and spatial organization.
The design brief was to create a medical office for the client, a local doctor, and additional leasable retail spaces. As the project developed, the additional spaces became increasingly medically oriented. This project seeks to disrupt the typical suburban medical office typology of a rectangular building set back from the road by a vast parking lot. By wrapping the three buildings around a courtyard of landscaped parking, the buildings create a protected interior space for users to enter the various medical offices -- inverting the exterior and interior spaces, while still reading as a unified mass from the roads. The corners of the buildings meet the highway to the front of the project and a service road to the side, introducing a more commonly urban typology to this suburban area. The buildings are slightly inset from the property lines to allow for two drive-up service windows on either side of the complex. The planes of the exterior walls are only interrupted by staff entrances to the buildings, signalled by recessed utility closets, and by small overhangs protecting the drive-up windows. By inverting the typical typology to create an interior courtyard with entries to the businesses, a unique challenge arose in placing the mechanical and service areas of the project. The solution was to create hidden mechanical closets indented around the perimeter and to strategically place utilities in small islands around the buildings
Entry points into the courtyard offer curated glimpses at the surroundings, while the reflective glass of the interior facades magnifies those views. The many reflective surfaces also extend and multiply the strong horizontal lines of the buildings, while the plantings of the interior courtyard soften and temper the effect. The reflections in the courtyard bring to mind Robin Evan’s seminal essay “Mies van der Rohe’s Paradoxical Symmetries” as the mirrored surfaces also serve to create symmetry through reflection, augmenting the asymmetrical design.
The courtyard figuration creates parking for the medical offices and generous landscaping, which adds shade and creates a cooler microclimate within the boundaries. Aluminum trellis overhangs protect the entrances to the medical offices from rain and provide additional shading for the buildings and pedestrian walkway circumnavigating the complex. They create a strong linear patterning, which is multiplied by the reflective glass surfaces. The corners of this courtyard are anchored with four peaks, which disrupt the otherwise linear buildings and give the complex an internal topography. In the interiors of the buildings, the peaks provide additional diffused, natural light by way of skylights made of FRP Kalwall panels. Skylights and large windows allow natural light into the lobby spaces of the medical offices, allowing them to be less reliant on artificial light sources, again disrupting the common typology of an environmentally inert medical building, where the interior is disconnected from outside and is reliant on artificial lighting and air conditioning.
