Out of the box

Maj. Herb Fuqua was startled the first time he walked into the Kroc Community Center's assembly hall.

“I looked around and thought, ‘Is this finished?'” said Fuqua, the administrator at the Salvation Army's new south Omaha community center. “Some of the tiles on the walls seemed to be sticking pretty far out.”

The hall was not only finished but also had been tuned to acoustical perfection. The tiles jut out of the walls on purpose, said David Lempke, the HDR architect who oversaw the Kroc Center project.

“There are no straight lines or flat surfaces in this assembly hall,” Lempke said. “The geometry of the hall is designed to produce the clearest and warmest possible sound.”

The $30 million community center, which held its official grand opening this month, has provided the neighborhood around 27th and Y Streets with state-of-the-art educational and recreational facilities. But the building is also a significant architectural achievement.

The structure boasts a sleek, elegant modern shape that partially disguises its immense 120,000-square-foot size. Its design makes optimum use of natural light during the day while it glows with colorful iridescence at night. And its assembly hall is an acoustical marvel.

Lempke, 45, has had lots of experience working with acoustics. The veteran architect was one of the lead designers behind the Holland Performing Arts Center. He also worked on Iowa Western Community College's Southwest Iowa Performing Arts Center and on the renovation of the Orpheum Theater.

But Lempke had never designed a building like the Kroc Center — a complex that is part concert hall, part community college and part athletic and aquatic center.

“It's an unusual arrangement, but that's what Joan Kroc wanted,” Lempke said.

When she died in 2003, the late McDonald's heiress left $1.5 billion to the Salvation Army to build community centers around the country. She directed that these centers should provide people in economically stressed neighborhoods with access to recreation, education and the arts.

Moreover, she wanted flexible facilities that people could use their whole lives and never outgrow. And she insisted that each center be tailored to its community — unlike McDonald's franchises, no two Kroc Centers should necessarily look alike.

Lempke and his team responded to Kroc's instructions with an innovative hybrid design.

The building's exterior consists of distinct but connected parts, with each section serving one of the center's objectives. The most visually distinctive element is the assembly hall.

Its oval-shaped exterior is placed prominently at the center of the site. The box-shaped interior serves as a warm and intimate space for the performing arts.

The walls are covered with large tiles that are asymmetrically slanted at 10-degree angles. Depending on their location, the tiles serve to either reflect or absorb sound. All of the tiles around the maple wood stage are reflective.

“Some of these tiles look like they belong on the space shuttle,” said Carl Larson, the center's facility services director.

Lempke demonstrated the function of the tiles by clapping his hands. Although the hall was empty, there was no echoing reverberation, just a clear, crisp sound.

The hall can hold up to 500 people and includes a state-of-the-art sound system.

Windows in the hall are also high-tech. They are covered with two layers of electronically controlled shades, which adjust lighting in the hall as precisely as the tiles shape the sound.

“The spirit of architecture is often determined by how it uses light,” Lempke said.

Light is a dominant feature of the large rectangular structure that serves as the backdrop of the assembly hall.

The north side of the facade features large windows to fill the structure with light. During the day, long, thin strips of electric light on the 28-foot ceiling look like sunbeams coming through the windows.

The 400-foot-long structure is built on a split level, with the ground floor containing party and meeting rooms, a basketball court and an aquatic center, and the upper deck housing athletic rooms, classrooms, computer room and reading room.

The ceiling is curved like a cupped hand and serves essentially as a light scoop for the second level. Yellow paint on the ceiling enhances the sunlight to create a sense of warmth.

Lempke and his team paid as much attention to detail in this section of the Kroc Center as in the assembly hall. Windows in the basketball court, for instance, are frosted to prevent glare.

Among the more surprising details in the center are its “found” spaces. These pockets were deliberately designed around corridors and elevators to give people a place to chat without blocking hallways.

“We wanted to find ways to encourage people to interact,” Lempke said.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about the Kroc Center is that the complex is actually bigger than it looks.

Lempke and fellow architects didn't want to place a 120,000-square-foot box in a neighborhood that included a lot of residential housing.

So they designed a grouping of geometric shapes that were not all visible at once, and then surrounded them with lots of green space.

This created what Lempke describes as a sequence of arrival — first you see the green space, then the assembly hall and other parts of the complex, then the parking lot.

“It's more visually appealing that way,” Lempke said. “And that makes us a better neighbor.”

Contact the writer:

444-1076, john.pitcher@owh.com

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