The Oympia Arts Center is an adaptive reuse of a 1906 brewery, addressing the creative needs of the city while maintaining a beloved cultural icon. The new building eschews traditional reuse strategies -neither attempting to delineate between new and old through severe material differentiation, nor seeking to represent a single historic era. Instead, the existing structure is treated as a building material in itself, with portions of the existing structure removed based on contemporary needs –at times merely portions of a floor, at others junctures entire buildings.
New programmatic elements –a black box theatre, freestanding galleries, and floating walkways- are inserted into this existing shell, serving as structural members that mitigate load and sheer forces. Thus, a symbiotic relationship is created: existing building encloses new elements, offering protection from outside forces; and new elements give needed structural integrity to the dilapidated shell. As such, the line between new and old is blurred, resulting in a building that is simply an expression of what is appropriate to site, structure, program and collective memory.
