The vision of the project was to adaptively reuse a defunct mall into the coolest place on the planet to learn. While the mall, transformed into a community college, was to become the anchor for a new type of P3 mixed-use development centered on learning, the rest of the development filled the mall’s parking lots with walkable residential, retail, and business uses, making the project the center of work, live, and play while providing an economic boost to the community. ACC Highland welcomes the community into the Paseo for public interaction with the community college that creates linkages and collegiate public amenities across the mixed-use site. The mall had its own history and materiality that we sought in the adaptive reuse, both to reduce the overall carbon footprint of the new building and to salvage and repurpose items such as demolished storefront glass and steel to preserve them as community assets. As we researched the mall’s history we discovered it was once St. John’s encampment, a place of workforce training for freed men of color in the 1880s. Adaptive reuse celebrates that history and embodies materiality in ways that serve a new diverse workforce aligned to the needs of Central Texas.
The team discovered the complexity of adapting a mall into state-of-the-art educational spaces. Structural deficiencies, bouncy floors, and cheap 1970s era construction revealed many lessons and opportunities for improvement. Specialized spaces required significant structural, infrastructural, and acoustical modification to the mall building. Rather than full scale demolition and removal, the design and construction management team worked together to analyze the situation and make strategic improvements rather than resort to wholesale replacement.
Adaptive reuse of a mall is innovative alone, but to have an educational project anchor a mixed-use development required new ways for envisioning the spaces of work/life/learning in a single multimodal location. The existing building, with a footprint of an enclosed mall, made adaptive reuse more challenging and the sharing of the infrastructure between all of the campus buildings made incorporation of sustainable concepts difficult but even then, the team was successful in delivering a LEED Gold project. This is all what make this project the international model for adaptive reuse of blighted malls and buildings, thereby substantially reducing carbon while breathing new life into a community.
Category:Green ArchitectureYear:2025Location: Austin, Texas, USAArchitects:Barnes Gromatzky Kosarek Architects (BGK Architects)Associate Architects: Perkins & Will, Austin, Texas, United StatesLandscape Architects:Coleman & AssociatesGeneral Contractor:Flintco, LLC.Design Team:Jay Barnes, Todd Kaiser, Tommy Kosarek, Rick Moore, Lauren Goldberg, Keith Pinkelman, and Fred Peebles, Angela Whitaker-Williams, Ron Stilmarski, Gardner Vass, Travis HughbanksClient:Austin Community CollegePhotographers:Dror Baldinger
