Newpark Town Center facade redesign was our first foray into facade renovation, making the project incredibly formative in creating our process that we use in facade projects to this day. It comprised a careful approach to a large development, where we used a stripped-down set of tools to achieve a major impact. Visually, the new facade took years off of the shopping center, giving it the ability to continue handling daily heavy use for years to come.
10 minutes from Park City’s historic town center and surrounded by the Swaner Nature Preserve, Newpark Town Center has been a staple of the growing Park City community since its construction. With 122.303 square feet of shopping, dining, recreation, workspaces, and neighboring residential buildings, it’s a campus that’s never empty, no matter the time of day.
We set out to refresh the aging, brightly colored facade in order to give the entire campus a more refined and updated feel. While functionally in great shape, the fading and stained colors and outdated materials were affecting the atmosphere across the campus. In our exploration of potential interventions, we saw an opportunity to limit ourselves to using a palette of neutrals in order to make big changes while keeping costs, environmental impact, and customer disruptions low.
The neighboring nature reserve and the iconic mountains surrounding old Park City served as inspiration when building our color palette. We’d seen how the shopping center’s original color scheme made it stick out, and we wanted to use a simpler palette of neutrals to bring it into harmony with its surroundings. We sampled colors from all four seasons of Park City’s landscape until we’d narrowed it down to a small handful, and then added depth and personality through pops of red and yellow.
This project was unique, as it didn’t require the use of standard architectural tools. Rather, we made use of Photoshop and other digital art and photography tools to create collections of paint schemes and renderings. Treating the renderings as art pieces allowed us to work efficiently, trying on various schemes and configurations to quickly identify which would be most successful. Throughout the project, we were able to identify a process that was efficient and non-disruptive to the everyday users of the campus.
