Conceived as a modern-day forum, The Citizen is a mid-rise development in downtown Oklahoma City that contains a diverse blend of functions intended to support and stimulate meeting and engagement.
Situated opposite the Oklahoma City National Memorial, hallowed ground that remembers the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in 1995, the site required a sensitive and contextual design response. A colonnaded entrance, generously set back from the street, draws the urban realm deep into the building. This ‘city room’ serves as the building foyer, banking hall and café, enlivening both entrance and sidewalk. Above, a diverse blend of uses includes co-working space, a members’ club, a hotel, tech start-up incubator, culminating with offices at the upper levels, one of which the AHMM OKC office has moved into.
The Citizen Building was designed as a lean hardworking building – endless flexibility and easily reconfigurable. Its robust and high-volume space with expressed concrete structure and services are designed to be flex in use and for future adaptability. The generous windows cast natural light deep into the floorplate and maximize 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, 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.
The exterior draws inspiration from neighbouring towers, reinterpreting the verticality and window rhythms of their 1930s styling through a contemporary unitized aluminium and glass cladding system, used 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 façade. Like its historical antecedents, the rigor of the street-fronting elevations is broken at the party wall condition, where a more playful composition of porthole windows express 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.
