The Citizen is a mid-rise development in downtown Oklahoma City that from its inception has aimed to promote civic discourse by bringing disparate people together in this modern-day forum.
Sitting across the street from the Oklahoma City National Memorial, the generous ground floor volume is set back to extend the urban realm deep into the building, and a banking hall and restaurant engage with the building foyer to further activate and enliven the entrance. Above, a diverse blend of uses includes co-working space, a members’ club, a hotel and a tech start-up incubator, culminating with offices at the upper levels, one of which the AHMM OKC office has moved into.
A take on a 21st century ‘warehouse’, The Citizen was designed as a lean hard-working building – endlessly flexible and easily reconfigurable. Its robust and high-volume space with expressed concrete structure and services is designed to be flexible in use and for future adaptability. The generous windows cast natural light deep into the floorplate and maximise the views over the city. Vertical circulation is banked into the perimeter of the building, which at lower levels abuts a neighbouring parking garage, but at higher levels affords the staircases and office lobbies with a magnificent view and natural light. Circulation space is kept to a minimum, and doors to the staircase are held open to make it a conspicuous feature of the lobby, promoting its use for shorter journeys in place of the elevators, and expressing the movement of people within the building on the outside.
Neighbouring 1930s architecture was used as the springing point for the exterior expression of the new building, which takes the prevailing vertical emphasis and characteristic paired window configuration of the art deco towers and reinvents the language to suit contemporary aluminium and glass unitised cladding, a system being used here for the first time in Oklahoma City.
Regular projecting vertical fins afford a depth and solidity to the otherwise economical skin and vary the appearance of the building strikingly from different vantage points, particularly at different times of the day as sunlight, shadow, and reflections track across the facade. Like its historical antecedents, the rigour of the street-fronting elevations is broken at the party wall condition, where a more playful composition of porthole windows expresses the stairs, elevators, and restrooms.
With its well-mannered exterior, its acknowledgement of the past but design for the future, and its varied offering of public and private functions, the building itself is conceived as a Citizen of the city.
