Mulock Park – Maintenance Building

In this facility, practical and aesthetic considerations coalesce. Mulock Park’s Maintenance Building contains a garage and maintenance yard, plus staff lunchroom, office, and change-room space. The building and its fenced yard also accommodate much of the 16-acre site’s electrical equipment and serve as the park’s garbage collection hub.

It performs all these functions from a cul-de-sac at the park’s southwest corner, where it is clearly visible from several homes on the street. What residents see is a quiet, cedar-shake-clad volume, fronted by a view-screening mechanical gate that is one of several site-specific permanent artworks commissioned for locations throughout the park. Georgia Dickie’s gate, Enter and Flow, is a layered metal collage that recombines notebook sketches and scribbles from the park’s conceptual design stage into a piece of art that “embraces the idea of process as a final work.”
The yard’s fence meanders to protect existing trees’ roots. Sinking the electrical room’s roof height down below a parapet screens two rooftop-mounted chillers from view. Maintenance Building green features include mineral wool insulation, minimal use of drywall and applied interior finishes, ample daylighting, and Variable Refrigerant Flow (VRF) heating and cooling. For operational efficiency, heating is also zoned: the garage is only minimally heated, while the staff areas will be more intensively heated in in the colder months. Operable windows in the staff area will reduce reliance on air conditioning in the warmer months.