Armory Building Manager Valerie Roberts has updated the Olympia City Council about the Olympia Armory Creative Campus phase one plan, which focused on designing with the community through artists' interventions.
At the city council meeting on July 18, Roberts announced they now have a concept plan for the 50,000-square-foot building. Collaborating with Framework Cultural Placemaking and engaging the community through surveys, interviews, and focus groups with over 5,000 participants, they formulated a "dream vision" for the creative campus.
"This will be one of our guiding documents that will help inform how we can move the Armory from its current existence into an art center," Roberts said.
The Armory will move forward with the design and construction.
Olympia received a $75,000 Our Town grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to support the Armory Creative Campus – Arts Interventions and Facility Designs.
The city also received a $1 million award from Heritage Capital grant.
"We are going to be engaging artists with these art interventions to pilot tests of space and inform design through art creation," Roberts said.
The purpose of arts interventions is to engage artists, culture bearers, and a youth action council to imagine uses of the space through temporary art installations and creative pop-ups to inform facility design.
Nine organizations have been granted access to the Armory space for transformative projects.
"There's going to be a lot of community feedback, a lot of art participation feedback that we can take to our contractor with the DES (Department of Enterprise Services) Energy Savings Program to inform how are we shaping these spaces to be more useful, more engaging, more possible for artists to use," Roberts said.
The next action entails partnering with the DES Energy Savings Program. Roberts said the collaboration will allow them to work with an energy savings company to facilitate the initial design and construction phase.
Roberts mentioned that phase one is also about accessibility and building improvements for safety, which include HVAC, electrical, mechanical, plumbing, seismic studies, securing the external part of the building so it is preserved, putting in an elevator, and updating the bathroom for ADA compliance.
"This is an important step. 90% of the work in phase one is perfectly aligned with the DES Energy Savings Program and the energy savings company, or ESCO, that we will select to work with. We will benefit from a suite of experts who look at energy savings and these types of installations and buildings to put in the best possible systems for us to use them going forward," Roberts explained.
Roberts discussed the benefits of the energy savings program:
"We can use that to leverage and benefit the possibilities of phase one," Roberts said. "In addition, the price that they offer at the end of that audit is guaranteed regardless of inflation costs."
Meanwhile, Roberts invites the community to discuss the four types of spaces identified in the concept plan – community arts hub, art-making spaces, performance and rehearsal, and classrooms and offices.
The Olympia Armory Creative Campus has partnered with contractor 110% to assist them in the scope of work, including developing a business plan, crafting a lease agreement, and helping identify and select anchor partners who would take long-term leases in the building.
In the concept plan, Roberts said the city will retain ownership of the building, but the anchor partners will provide the art programming throughout the building.
The Armory will select four to seven anchor partners.
CORRECTION, July 25, 2023: The original version of this story misstated the number of anchor partners sought by the city. We regret our error.
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