Knox College Whitcomb Art Center

The Whitcomb Art Center creates a vibrant home for the Knox College art program. The facility consolidates the studio and art history departments in a new light-filled and cost-effective modern building anchored by a landscaped event and work courtyard. Inside, a series of double-height studios, galleries, and critique spaces foster a vibrant interdisciplinary art community and program. The building is a high-performing workhorse shaped for efficient daylight capture and made of simple industrial materials carefully assembled in surprising and elegant ways.

Crafted with a pre-engineered metal frame and leftover materials from the campus stockpile, the exterior blends into the nearby Main Street and the adjacent railroad infrastructure. The rhythmic sawtooth roofline, skylights that harvest north daylight, and accents of reclaimed brick and reused wood combine to create a hardworking facility that fits within its industrial context.

Knox College sought to create a facility that would provide ample high-performance academic and support space for the studio and art history departments. The distinct disciplines of painting, drawing, ceramics, sculpture, design, printmaking, photography, and art history needed to be accommodated along with the unique support spaces of these disciplines. A desire for more connectivity amongst faculty led to increasing the number of shared spaces and minimizing walls and doors to encourage the free flow of people into and between almost every room in the building.

A series of double height studios, galleries, and critique spaces foster a vibrant interdisciplinary art community. A lecture hall accommodates large gatherings and receptions to celebrate student works. Open stairs, intimate informal seating areas, and public pin-up spaces encourage the exchange of ideas. Operable panels enable studios to open to adjacent spaces to encourage collaboration or at times close to provide acoustic and visual privacy. Each program studio is closely paired with support spaces including outdoor work courts, digital labs, metal and wood shops, and dark rooms.

Working closely with Lake Flato on the Whitcomb Art Center has been one of the most rewarding and invigorating undertakings of my professional life. Even now, every time I walk into the building, I get a little jolt of excitement and a renewed energy for teaching as an act of collaboration and discovery. I know our students feel it too. Mark Holmes

Chair, Department of Art and History, Knox College

Sustainable Design

Doing More with Less

With an extremely lean project budget that yielded a construction cost of only $220/square foot, the Whitcomb Art Center reflects the self-described scrappy and unconventional community of Knox’s art department. Within this lean mindset, every design decision contributed to multiple performance goals in a highly integrated way. The building’s sawtooth form is precisely shaped to capture rainwater and to bring the highest quantity and quality of the region’s northern daylight into the interior, providing artists with the best lighting conditions possible in which to do their work with a dramatic reduction in energy achieved through a resulting reduction in electric lighting needed.

Sustainable Design

Pre-Engineered Building Systems

The design team navigated a limited budget and resources by working creatively with pre-engineered metal building systems and integrating salvaged materials The exposed structural frame on the interior became a prominent design feature of each studio space. The offset gable profile of each structural bay is comprised of a single steel frame shape repeated throughout the building. The design team developed this custom shape in collaboration with the contractor’s pre-engineered metal building provider, yielding an optimized building structure using the least amount of steel for the spans and volumes required.