NBA Nabs Two Student Housing Business Innovator Awards
NBA brought home two Student Housing Business Innovator Awards at this year’s Student Housing Conference in Austin, Texas! Flamingo Crossings Village won an Innovator Award in the Best Implementation of Mixed-Use or Live/Learn category and Appalachian State University, West Campus Housing took top spot in the Best Public/Private Partnership Development category. Congratulations to both project teams for this prestigious recognition. Scroll down to learn more about the award-winning communities…
Category: Best Implementation of Mixed-Use or Live/Learn
Project: Flamingo Crossings Village
Owner, Manager and Developer: American Campus Communities
With 154-acres in two parcels and 3.8 million square feet of programmed space, Flamingo Crossings Village (FCV), designed as Walt Disney World’s new home for its College Intern Program, is itself the scale of a small college. The site plan, inspired by the best qualities of campus design, creates a pedestrian-oriented experience for the 10,440 residents by pushing 5,247 surface parking spaces and vehicular traffic to the periphery, and centering a Quad on each site, to which all neighborhood pathways lead. With all phases complete in December 2022, every aspect of the new live/learn/play community strives to surprise and delight residents while reflecting the client’s unique history, culture, brand, and commitment to distinctive placemaking.
Taking cues from Disney Parks and Resorts, where the entrance is the magical point of immersion into the guest experience, the FCV East Education (Apprentice Hall) and Community Center buildings sit united under one gestural roof. The space between them is transformed into an open threshold ‘main street’ that serves as the passageway into the Disney collegiate experience. This ‘building as threshold’ architecturally signifies the students’ movement into the next phase of their lives. It opens itself with its transparent interiors, the dynamic slash of its skylight, and the predicted Floridian breeze created in its sheltering porch.
FCV West’s Community Center takes a different form, anchored so the front entry aligns with the main walk of West’s Campus. Where the East amenity buildings feature a skylit breezeway, West has an open porch, a colonnade where residents can escape a sudden downpour or shelter from the sun. The form acts as a contemporary front door for the project.
A clean palette of exterior materials: limestone, low-e clear glazing, and warm wood-tone metal panels create a unified, contemporary yet timeless presence for all amenity buildings that contrasts to the residential scale of the materials used in the apartments. A highlight of Apprentice Hall is the building’s cornice: a twelve-foot cantilever clad in iridescent blue green Alpolic metal panels. The color becomes an oceanic way-finding element throughout the campus.
The two-story south elevation of the West Community Center faces the pool areas, and the streamlined architecture of the limestone and metal clad building is broken by a glass ‘iceberg,’ a fritted glass shard that allows the inside to pop out in a playful way. Architecturally, the design is a three-dimensional geometric play that nods to the dynamic breezeway on the East Campus but asserts its own place as an anchoring moment that can be seen and recognized from a distance.
Category: Best Public/Private Partnership Development
Project: Appalachian State University, West Campus Housing
Developer: RISE Real Estate Company
Andy Frame Photography
In 2017, Appalachian State University (ASU), a 20,000-student university in the mountains of North Carolina, needed to replace 1,800 student beds across six aging buildings, the oldest being 65 years old without any renovation. ASU’s student body was also growing 3% annually, driving a need to replace aging buildings and increase the number of beds on campus. The existing residence halls on ASU’s West Campus felt disconnected from the rest of campus, interconnected by a 500-space surface parking lot instead of greenspace or a quad. The halls showed their age, not only with their bathrooms shared by 30+ residents and failing infrastructure, but also with their amenities – limited common spaces, no group study spaces, no kitchens, no meeting rooms, and no air conditioning. The campus tour guides had long stopped touring the West Campus, preferring to show off the new dorms and more traditional college campus feel of East Campus.
ASU initiated a nationally competitive procurement process to identify a turnkey project solution in a Public Private Partnership (P3) arrangement. The University selected RISE Real Estate as the Master Developer for a multi-phase revitalization called the West Campus Housing Transformation, the largest capital project in university history. The goal was to successfully deliver 2,299 beds aligned with ASU’s vision, needs, budget and schedule, and a design seamlessly integrated into the rest of campus, creating a sense of community and connectedness for ASU’s students. By transforming what was previously a series of isolated dorms surrounding the perimeter of a surface parking lot into a residential neighborhood anchored by a common green space, this redevelopment project truly revitalized and created a new sense of place for ASU’s West Campus.
Raven Rocks, Thunder Hill, Laurel Creek and New River Halls, all named for popular destinations along the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway, replace traditional dorm housing with 2,299 beds in 662 modern suite-style and apartment units. All four buildings received Green Built certification, adding to ASU’s commitment to being on the forefront of sustainability. Living-leaning amenities are incorporated throughout to support and enhance the University’s leading freshmen retention rate. Study lounges strategically located on key corners of every floor allow natural light into the corridors and provide inspiring views of campus. Additional amenities include meeting rooms, Residential Life offices, community kitchens, social lounges, smart laundry facilities, covered bike storage, and two new centralized waste, recycling, and composting stations.
The existing buildings on ASU’s campus are all of a similar scale, creating a 'collegiate village' woven into the small-town fabric of Boone. The architectural style includes a range of traditional American gothic and contemporary buildings with a unifying material palette of red brick, stone, and Hartford Green metal. These new housing facilities extend the ‘campus village’ across River Street, firmly establishing West Campus among the mountainous landscape. The completed design pairs campus standard materials with timeless aesthetics, thoughtful proportions, and strong building entries, that builds on the modern contemporary campus style.
The University estimated replacing the aging dorms would have cost significantly more without the private sector’s involvement. Delivered on-time and on-budget over three phases, this successful public-private partnership created a faster, more efficient, and cost-effective development process which resulted in new, modern housing for 2,299 ASU students.