Gateway Exchange

Winder, Georgia

2014-2016

Gateway Exchange

Gateway Exchange is a 15,000 sf medical and retail center comprised of three buildings that form a large, landscaped courtyard. The project inverts the typical American retail typology of one large building surrounded by a sea of parking, creating a project that simultaneously explores exteriority and interiority. The exterior reads as one large urban project comprised of varied masses organized as a single object, while voids between the buildings in the interior court create framed views to the surrounding site. Geometric skylights frame the four corners of the project and provide large, daylit interior volumes. Aluminum trellises shade and light a landscaped pedestrian walk path surrounding the courtyard, provide a project scale transition from exterior to interior facades, and frame perspectival views within the courtyards. Solid/void relationships, planarity, transparency, reflection, and proportionally moving datums inform the project’s formal and spatial organization.

Skylight Interior

Geometric skylights frame the four corners of the project and provide large, daylit interior volumes. Composite (insulated fiberglass) skylights diffuse light into the large, clerestory volume at each building corner, creating soft tonal variations across the crisply intersected walls and ceiling planes that register the sunlight intensity, direction, and color.