Donald Julian Reaves Student Activities Center, Winston-Salem State University

Winston-Salem, NC
Construction Cost: $29 million
Area / Square Feet: 90,000
Occupancy Date: August 2013

The Donald Julian Reeves Student Activities Center at Winston-Salem State University encourages healthy lifestyles while serving as a gateway to the central campus. Built into a hillside, the facility’s unique placement provides a natural transition between the academic core campus and the main residential campus. The building’s central grand staircase connects student recreation spaces, dining and lounges. The natural light that filters throughout the building played an inspirational role in the design process of the LEED Gold-certified facility.

The interior design is conceptualized as neighborhoods of activity, providing a wide range of fitness activities with varying degrees of openness and widely differing character to support a diversity of user needs and experiences. Breaking down the scale of a large complex, these neighborhoods reveal themselves to both the gymnasium atrium and the exterior as a dense layering of spaces, with transparency that sometimes appears to extend through the entire building, both horizontally and vertically.

WSSU’s former fitness center, located in the lower level of the adjacent Thompson Center, was a cramped home to only 15 workout stations, with a complete absence of natural light. The sunlit three-story fitness center in the new Student Activities Center accommodates approximately 85 workout stations, and two group exercise studios can accommodate another 50 participants.