Louisiana Army National Guard Readiness Center Covington

After Hurricane Katrina, the State of Louisiana decided to strategically place multiple Louisiana Army National Guard facilities around the state in order to decrease their response time after natural disasters. The Louisiana Army National Guard Readiness Center Covington, completed in July 2008, is the first of fifteen Army National Guard Projects completed in Louisiana. The new 30,000-square-foot home of the 1021st Engineer Company and Detachment 1 of the 843rd Engineering Company occupies 3.4 acres in Covington, Louisiana. The facility is designed to serve two-hundred part time National Guard troops and five full-time staff, and houses administration offices, an assembly hall, training classrooms, a fitness room, locker rooms, kitchen, recruiting center, family support center, and security vault.

The design-build team of HMS Architects and Citadel Builders LLC, both of New Orleans, Louisiana, worked closely with the client to provide a facility that would meet all of their programmatic needs and the stringent design criteria of the National Guard for anti-terrorism force protection achieving a SPiRit Gold Rating and LEED Silver Certification. The primary function of the facility is to provide administrative, training, and material storage areas for assigned military units. The secondary function is that it be utilized in support of state functions such as disaster relief and policing actions in case of civil disturbance. The tertiary function is to provide for military and community social functions.

The project was administered with the design-build project management approach due to the limited time constraints resulting from special funding appropriated from Congress. The design started in September 2006; construction began less than six months later in February 2007 and was completed in the following seventeen months. The design-build method provided the architect and contractor an advantage by allowing early collaboration on construction methods, materials, and design ideas. Through architect/contractor collaboration, the project was designed with minimal wall types and fewer varieties of carefully chosen interior finishes further reducing construction time. The result allowed for many phases of the traditional design-bid-build method to be eliminated, saving valuable time.

The final building design was integrated into an existing semi-rural site. An outdated, unused meeting facility and an old readiness center were demolished making room for the new development. Particular attention was given to protecting the existing live oak trees that surrounded the site. New trees were added providing an extensive landscape screening between the building and its residential neighbors. The newly planted trees will also gain LEED points through reducing the heat island effect of the large paved surfaces. A large rainwater retention pond was also added to the site, alleviating much of the storm water run-off due to the increase of site paving for the military vehicles. To further minimize the rainwater run-off, grass pavers were placed at the fifty-six public parking spaces near the front of the building. The pavers challenged the design-build team to innovatively developed a solution to reduce the cost of the pavers by implementing a poured in place paver system in lieu of the traditional individual pavers.

The overall building design is comprised of a low unobtrusive one story brick and steel building approximately 240 feet by 107 feet set back 100' from the street as required by National Guard guidelines. The largest portion of the building, the 5,700-square-foot assembly hall, was tucked into the back of the building, minimizing the large volume from the street view. The assembly hall's main overhead doors open up to the local fairgrounds behind the property, allowing it to serve as a joint-use facility for military and civilian events. Several smaller secondary buildings on an adjacent tract of land are used for vehicle maintenance, hazardous materials storage, fuel tanker parking, and vehicle wash-down.

A majority of the design focus was given to meeting the stringent Anti-Terrorism Force Protection (ATFP) requirements of the National Guard, while still allowing for the building to be designed to SPiRit and LEED Silver Guidelines. Careful attention was given to selecting durable materials that would minimize operational cost and still meet the sustainable criteria of SPiRiT and LEED.

The primary exterior building materials consist of concrete block and brick masonry walls with a 4-inch air space, R-19 rigid board insulation, and membrane waterproofing. The glazing system is insulated tinted and reflective glass that meets both the ATFP blast resistance and the International Building Code