Overview

The Health and Wellness Building at the Pennsylvania State University’s Schuylkill Haven campus serves as a hub of activity for students, faculty, and visitors. Housing the campus’ gymnasium and fitness rooms, it also provides space to host meetings, health and wellness programs, and a variety of student affairs events. A previous addition to the building had added office and administrative space, but additional student space was needed in the building. This lead to us studying the reconfiguration options of underutilized locker room spaces for the purpose of adding student meeting and office space.

Solution Details

We met with campus staff to review the existing building spaces and their uses. During the meeting, needs for the proposed Student Government Association (SGA) spaces were discussed. Based on these discussions we prepared a program outlining the campus’ requirements for the spaces to be renovated as well as the new student areas.

We prepared several floor layout options which reconfigured underutilized locker room space into a new SGA meeting room and office. As part of the proposed layouts a new corridor access to these spaces was included, eliminating existing circulation routes that required passage through adjacent meeting spaces. Smaller staff locker spaces were also created as part of the layout, separate from the larger team and student locker spaces. As part of the design process we reviewed code requirements for impact to the means of egress and fire rated construction in the existing building.

After reviewing and discussing the options with the campus staff we refined the proposed design based on feedback received. Renderings and an opinion of cost were also prepared to assist the campus in planning for implementation of the project.