Broomfield Community and Recreation Center

The city and county of Broomfield, Colorado, epitomizes a true sense of community – unifying its residents, guests, and visitors. The Denver suburb wanted one centralized building to connect its diverse population — an essential goal for a new community center. The owner’s overarching goal was to create a landmark that would connect not only the physical building and lush open space to its existing city campus, but that was inclusive and welcoming to all generations in the community.

Unique to this project, a design build solution incorporating precast concrete was selected for the Recreation Center half of the facility. The Recreation Center specifically required a building material that provided durability, flexibility, efficiency, safety, and a façade to blend with the city and county’s color and material pallet. Although a tall order, precast concrete was identified as the ideal and most efficient solution. Acknowledging the wide variety of amenities this center would make available to its guests; intense planning, maximized coordination and over-the-top attention to detail were essential to build a 60,000 plus square foot building with an accelerated construction schedule.

With direction to design and build an energy efficient structure that exceeded ASHRAE 90.1 and International Energy Conservation Code requirements, CarbonCast High Performance Insulated Wall Panels were used that had an R-Value of 17.4. The CarbonCast panels do not contain voids or cavities where moisture can collect, in the inherently high-humidity natatorium spaces, mold and mildew growth are no longer a concern. The insulated precast concrete wall panels were reinforced with C-GRID® carbon fiber grid, which allowed for thinner precast sections and reduced the weight of the enclosure system and foundation sizing while significantly improving the insulation value of the walls. In addition, the mass of the gymnasium and fitness center’s walls help control sound transmission into the adjacent Senior Center.

Essential to complementing the city and county’s color palette, materials and textures, the team painstakingly worked to create specialized surfaces and custom architectural mixes. The exterior of the natatorium and fitness center includes a Reckli – Columbia, wave-like form liner that hints at the interior aquatic space’s use. Another goal was to drive indirect sunlight into and through the warm pool and a sawtooth façade on the north elevation was the perfect feature. A custom, ribbed liner was used sparingly as an accent at the main entry and around the natatorium that picked-up the masonry detailing on the adjacent senior center. In this application and to ensure color consistency on the façade, acid etching was used on all of the architectural, precast concrete.

Read more about how precast concrete from Wells helped weather a bomb cyclone storm, expedited construction and allowed extraordinary interior spans.