Central Health Headquarters
Austin, Texas

Arizpe was contracted to provide design services for the renovation of the Central Health Headquarters building. The building, which was originally a grocery store built in the 1950’s had been through a number of renovations over the years. This created a building shell that had a strange duality of a highly ordered columnar-grid system juxtaposed with a seemingly random grouping of skylights. The struggle to merge the two systems became both the challenge and the design opportunity of the project.

In order to make sense of the skylights in this project the idea of constellations was used as inspiration. Honing in on this idea, the skylights were connected to columns creating foci that formed an ellipse in the ceiling plane, thus layering geometric and cosmic order onto what was once a meaningless scatter. The ellipses were connected by a series of “orbits” that carried through the ceiling, walls and floor, denoting circulation.

In the design, offices were moved to the center, placing workstations along the perimeter, resulting in 100% access to light and view. Public functions were grouped by the main entry to separate visitor traffic from the private workspaces behind. This separation was combined with a badge-entry system to enhance security while maintaining an open and welcoming feel for the public areas. The secured portion featured increased workroom area and team rooms, decreasing demand on conference space. The parking lot was also reconfigured to create a more inviting presence at the street, increase the number of parking spaces and add a small pocket park as a part of the pedestrian sequence to the building.