Gathering Place – Lodge
Year: 2024 Design & Honor Awards | Category: Built Project over 5,000 SF
The Lodge is the formal front door to Gathering Place, a highly programmed, sixty-six acre public park. Donated to the people of Tulsa by the George Kaiser Family Foundation, it is the largest privately gifted public park in the United States.
The Lodge, a truly public space, fosters inclusion, inviting the Tulsa community in, freely, non judgmental, happily. Reimagining the materiality of the classic lodge and capturing it within a contemporary glass box, The Lodge offers spaces for individual contemplation, group gatherings, a cone full of ice cream, a casual beer and burgers with friends.
Design Challenge
Design a lodge for everyone, a place of healing and new vision.
The past history of the city of Tulsa has been one of social, economic, and racial division. The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 left hundreds of African Americans dead and Black Wall Street burned to the ground. This project as described by the client reflects the contemporary condition of the city. The park celebrates this change in the history of Tulsa whose present day condition is a city welcoming to everyone.
The architectural and environmental designs reflect this change. Architecture and landscape merge to engage the human condition to create a unique place of beauty, inspiration, and fun, a restorative place where people of every ilk can find refuge and come together in dignity.
The Lodge is the formal front door to Gathering Place. The Lodge is at once recognizable, welcoming and yet wonderous and slightly unfamiliar in its reinterpretation of past lodges. The Lodge is composed of familiar materials and elements deployed in extraordinary ways to create an uncommon place of expansive possibilities. The spaces of the Lodge are “unprogammed” liberating its use for everyone. “Spaces for all” is the framework for The Lodge design. The elements of the architecture of The Lodge are at once familiar and unfamiliar. This unfamiliarity is a means to create a place of liberation, unique to Tulsa.
The Lodge and park are free and open to all.
Project Information
Firm
Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects
Owner
George Kaiser Family Foundation
Project Location
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Completion Date
2/1/2021
Architects and Designers
Mack Scogin
Merrill Elam
Structural Engineer
Structural Engineering Associates, Inc.
Guy Nordenson and Associates (Conceptual)
MEPFP/IT Engineer
MPW Engineering
Landscape
Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates
Consultant Façade
Biggs Consulting Engineering, PLLC
Front, Inc.
Code Consultant
Arup
Lighting Design
Gabler-Youngston
Photographer
Landslides/Alex S. McLean
