Location: El Paso, United States.

Architect: KoningEizenberg with Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman & Spurlock Landscape.

The competition brief calls for an innovative Science and Children’s Museum in downtown El Paso, Texas, to welcome families from Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Ciudad Juarez, and the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora. The site is sloping and bridges a train line, with a required building area of 90,000+ sf. El Paso is a bicultural community with a strengthening economy and an emerging tech sector on both sides of the border, but border issues around inclusion, economic opportunity, and engagement still persist. The design proposal offers a park and museum concept that illuminates science, leveraging the location’s distinctive assets: its mountainous desert location and culturally diverse city in a “two-city, two-state, two-nation” region along the US-Mexico border. The museum proposes a collector’s cabinet of effects and phenomena designed to make the invisible visible, showcasing emerging technologies for energy and water sustainability. The building is designed for both construction simplicity and long-term flexibility, employing passive and active sustainable strategies that double as embedded learning opportunities. The wrapper, or vertical sunscreen, shades the atrium and draws inspiration from traditional regional pottery patterns and masonry screen walls, while the capping “sky canoes” that shade the roof deck are shaped to also collect water and maximize solar gain to the PV film lining. The museum will offer both formal ticketed experiences and informal settings conducive to large intergenerational family groups of varying means, with pop-up exhibits, staff-led interactive activities, cultural and civic events, and ample tables and green spaces for family picnics and casual social gatherings. The patio at the Franklin trolley stop anchors the informal programming of the museum, with gates at the El Paso and Santa Fe street ends securing the open space west of the museum entry on weekdays for formal programming.

Photo credit: KoningEizenberg.