Repurposing used gym flooring often takes the form of wall decor along an arena concourse or within a university’s basketball offices, but rarely does the reclaimed hardwood become the wall itself — and no less a piece of art. That was the case at Das Rec in New Braunfels, Texas, where designers took a floor salvaged from the University of California campus in Berkeley to create two semitransparent partitions separating circulation, weight training and cardio zones on the public recreation center’s fitness floor. The larger of the two walls guides visitors fittingly toward the ground-floor gymnasium entrance, even as it flanks a staircase. Building code dictated the density of the wall to be greater near the grand stair, but gaps between floor planks affixed to walnut studs allow for visual connection between workout spaces. “In public work, it’s kind of hard to specify something that’s reclaimed, because unless you know exactly what it is and have the city buy it ahead of time, you have to public bid the reclaimed thing,” says Stephen Springs, senior principal at Brinkley Sargent Wiginton Architects in Dallas. “We came up with what we would call a performance spec. We described in our spec and our drawings as best we could what the design intent was, what we were looking for and what we were not looking for in terms of colors for reclaimed gym flooring. We wanted it to be all maple, we wanted some striping, and we listed some colors as acceptable and some as not. The blue and the yellow that you see in the gym floor were among the colors that we felt were okay to have in the space. And that’s how it came to be. We found a supplier that salvages stuff around the country and then turns around and resells it. Somebody had purchased the gym floor that had been ripped out of Cal-Berkley’s gym at some point and put it in storage. There was a lot of effort that went into it. How do you do this in a public procurement situation? And there’s a little bit of risk to it, I would say, but there’s a lot of reward if it works — and it worked. It’s pretty cool.”
