Colby College Harold Alfond Athletics and Recreation Center

The Harold Alfond Athletics and Recreation Center is rooted in Colby College’s guiding ethos and values, supporting individual and collective growth through physical and mental health, and encouraging teamwork and community through sport and competition. The Center was designed for use well beyond the Colby athletics program, and will host a variety of community and recreational events, for students and the greater Waterville, Maine, community. The 350,000-square-foot building has become the largest athletics facility in the Northeastern US, comprising a multi-use field house, ice arena, an Olympic-sized pool, a competition gymnasium for basketball and volleyball, squash courts, a strength and fitness center, and multi-purpose studios, supported by locker rooms, sports medicine facilities and offices. Given its extraordinary scale occupying around one third of the entire campus footprint, the project gave us the opportunity to plan five large venues together at one time. We aimed to minimize their collective scale, exploring spatial and programmatic efficiencies to create a compact, coherent and efficient building, while the overall mass of the building is broken down to a series of forms which relate more holistically to the scale of the rest of the campus. The main entrance invites visitors into a lobby that opens up into a central landscaped courtyard. Envisaged as the heart of the project, the courtyard unifies the entire building around a single external space to establish a strong point of common identity, orientation and wayfinding with visual connections between and across all levels and venues. The compact venues deliver the required capacity whilst prioritising the performative nature of sport, to create an intense spectator experience with dramatic sightlines and seating in close proximity to the action. A hierarchy of materials is used to articulate the building’s organization and to convey a sense of human scale despite its size. Buildings facing the campus feature glass and a distinctively sheened grey brick used to complement the metallic finishes used elsewhere in the building. Materials progress through a translucent polycarbonate structure to the larger scale and industrial aesthetic of the metal panels that face the Interstate. Fitness and wellbeing are prioritised in a project that makes maximum use of natural daylight and connections to the surrounding landscape. Our ambition was to create a set of connected spaces that promoted holistic use, social interaction, and in which students would want to hang out or study, as well as compete or train. As a carbon-neutral institution, a high level of environmental sustainability and resource conservation were key to the College. Targeting LEED Gold certification, it sets new sustainability standards for large-scale sports facility design. The concept of an integrated sports facility allows for the sharing of resources which itself reduces overall building footprint. This extends to the building systems, where AHUs are shared between venues and heat energy is saved, moved from ice chilling to pool heating equipment.