Oak Hill Fire Station

Austin, Texas

This new 6,600 square foot fire station for the City of Austin provides dormitories, bathrooms, dayroom, kitchen, exercise room, and support spaces with a focus on maintainability and durability. Due to the topography of the site and the location within the most restrictive of the SOS Ordinance's zones, so solving space and site issues was immediately identified as the first major design consideration. McKinney York worked to revise the prototype fire station, eliminating inefficiencies and redundancies, and reached a new floor plan with a 15% smaller footprint that was adopted as the model for future stations. The simple palette of materials includes local concrete masonry, terrazzo, and metal roofing and siding, all selected for environmental sensitivity and long life span. The materials reinforce the massing of clean, crisp forms set within the rolling green hillside, silhouetted against the sky.