In a move that significantly advances Kentucky’s growing manufacturing population, BlueOvalSK is developing an EV battery plant on a 1,050-acre mega-site in Glendale, Kentucky. The Commonwealth of Kentucky and the Elizabethtown Community and Technical College (ECTC) committed to building an on-site training facility to prepare the future workforce for the battery plant.
Based upon its proven success in designing six previous workforce training facilities for KCTCS, Omni Architects was selected to design the new one-story facility, which will comprise multiple classroom spaces and high bay training labs. Support spaces include an administration suite, collaboration and study spaces, and storage rooms. The design team is prioritizing flexibility in all aspects of the project so that the building can address these evolving needs. The single story portion contains classrooms, offices, collaboration and study areas, restrooms, storage, and support spaces, while the double height space contains open labs for hands-on learning, storage, and a mechanical room. There are two main entrances that link through a collaboration-rich cross corridor, which serves as the main collaboration space of the building.
The building form was developed in combination with the programmatic floor plan layout of the training spaces inside the building. Locating the simple linear building form in a pure east-west orientation allows maximum amounts of ideal northern daylight to fill the classroom and open office spaces as well as the high bay training spaces.
To create an identity and showcase the importance of the training facility, the facade has been crafted to differentiate itself from future “plain” box manufacturing facilities. The entrances break the simple building form, by carving the space out of the southern high bay facade and breaking through the single story northern facade as an elevated glass-box.
The other exterior cladding materials, flat and corrugated metal panels, are common to large manufacturing facilities, however the articulation, placement, and color (blue) of the corrugated panels further help in breaking down the simple building form and provide a playful human-scaled intervention that will allow for modest BlueOvalSK and ECTC branding.