Throw a penny into a Homer crowd and odds are pretty good you'll plink an artist. At last week's public workshop on Homer's proposed Town Square and City Hall, the odds rose to almost even when local artists and craftspeople packed the Cowles Council Chambers for a discussion of how they could be involved with the design of Homer's civic complex, to be built in the heart of the Town Square east of Main Street between Pioneer Avenue and the Sterling Highway.
Photo by Michael Armstrong
A Google SketchUp image shows a recent version of the new Homer City Hall.
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Last week, the city began soliciting requests for proposals for artists to submit qualifications and general ideas. The city has set aside $70,000 of the construction budget for art. RFPs are available from the clerk's office.
Architect Brian Meissner of ECI/Hyer, the firm designing the new Town Hall, showed slides of the latest version. ECI/Hyer, Agnew::Beck Consulting, Corvus Design and Jay-Brant Contractors are the design-build team working on the project.
While the design is officially at 10 percent, last Thursday's concept differed slightly from previous visions. The general design remains of a multiple level office complex linked by a public corridor to the council chambers what is now called the Town Meeting Hall. The building backs up against a hill on the north or Pioneer Avenue side. A west parking lot connects to an entrance, with the corridor heading east to the meeting hall, and opening up on the town plaza. Timber posts frame that entrance.
"They become an aperture for art for artists to celebrate their craft," Meissner said.
A 6-foot high retaining wall at the west entrance creates a small plaza and a space for artists to put work. As part of the project planners' desire to incorporate artistic elements in building materials and stretch the art budget, the wall could be both aesthetic as well as practical, as was done with Leo Vait's fireplace in the new Homer Public Library.
Another possibility for artists is a proposed bridge from the slope above that plaza connecting to the second story. People coming to the building from above could enter along that bridge.
"That was my next question," said metalworker Tarri Thurman after Meissner spoke about the bridge. Thurman and partner Marlen Prazen made the crane handles for the library.
"We're looking for entry doors. We're looking for railings for the stairs," Meissner said.
The north wall will have some glass windows indirect sun for light-sensitive art work. The windows also present opportunities for glass art.
An earlier design combined gable roofs with long shed roofs, and a southern wall with notches or bumps. The bumps have been eliminated, and the building now has mostly gable roofs with dormers on the south roof face. New is a shed roof along the north roof, with vertical panels designed to catch the maximum sunlight. The town hall's upper attic story will hold most of the building's mechanical elements. That classic structure fits in with the Homer aesthetic, Meissner said.
"It also allows us to start supporting the craftsmanship of Homer," he said.
Andy Baker, an energy consultant working with the design team, spoke about some of the energy conservation elements of the town hall. The building will use super-insulated panels with a minimum of R-25 in insulation and aluminum and wood windows. Baker said the design starts by maximizing insulation and reducing and conserving energy as much as possible. He presented a proposal that on the surface might seem blue-sky for Homer's dark winters: using solar energy to generate heating.
"What we're going to do is make it sustainable and to future proof it against the rising cost of energy," Baker said of the new town hall.
In terms of solar gain, Homer is better than Anchorage and Anchorage is better than Fairbanks and comparable to lower latitudes, he said.
"We're as good as Seattle here. We have that much sun," Baker said.
He proposed putting heat collectors along the ridge of town hall. The collector would be tilted to catch the low angle of the winter sun, to shed snow and to catch sunshine reflected off the roof.
"The city hall site is an excellent site because the exposure is perfect, much wider open," Baker said.
The solar collectors would warm water running through tubes that is then piped through radiant floor heating. In the summer, the water would be used for heating water in bathrooms and kitchens.
Some members weren't so sure that solar collectors would work.
"I'm skeptical of this idea," said Pete Roberts. "I'm tickled you're going to superinsulated."
Roberts also wondered why parking couldn't be in an underground garage beneath town hall. Meissner said architects and engineers looked at that idea, but it didn't price out. Underground parking would run $30,000 a space, while outside parking is $3,000 a space.
"At that price, it's cost prohibitive," he said.
The estimated construction cost for the building is about $340 a square foot, Meissner said.
Programs like Google SketchUp the program use to present last week's ideas allow architects to make quick changes to the design. The latest version was so fresh it was almost a back-of-the-envelope sketch.
"We rethink the design, then we charge forward with the engineering," Meissner said last week a process he also said he'd start last Friday.
Information on the proposed town hall and town plaza is at www.homertownsquare.com, with a file that can be downloaded in Google SketchUp of an older design. New designs will be put up on the site as architects make them available.
Michael Armstrong can be reached at michael.armstrong@homernews.com.
