Coyote Center, Chandler-Gilbert Community College

Chandler, AZ
Construction Cost: $20.6 million
Area / Square Feet: 74,900
Occupancy Date: September 2014

The Coyote Center’s architecture unifies the unorthodox pairing of an athletics wing with a one-stop enrollment services wing, connected by a shared lobby. The building’s varying massing transitions in scale, creating a desired discourse between the existing one-story campus buildings, the new enrollment services wing and high-bay athletic spaces.

Set within a planted native landscape, the Coyote Center serves as a backdrop to a desert arroyo with shade trees, seating areas and elevated terraces. Earth mounding and subtle grading are utilized as a means of place-making, intensifying the experience of ascending to the front door, defining the athletic exercise courtyard, and tuning the height of the gymnasium’s south wall. The center embraces opportunities within a modest budget and the expressive qualities of common building materials. Light sage-green block walls ground the building in the landscape. A metallic-gray skin defines the primary enclosure, articulated with folded wall planes and stepped roof profiles that express continuity of varied spatial volumes. Inflected white metal walls and soffits visually lighten the building, blurring the line between inside and out while providing a canvas for the changing shadow play from intense sunlight.

The Coyote Center is pursuing LEED Gold certification with eco-strategies that include minimizing west-facing glazing, utilizing 50 percent screen-fritted glass, and incorporating a rooftop solar hot-water array that supplies the locker shower rooms directly below.