University of Oregon, Hatfield-Dowlin Complex, Football Performance Center

HATFIELDDOWLIN COMPLEX

UNIVERSITY OF OREGON FOOTBALL PERFORMANCE CENTER

HATFIELD-DOWLIN COMPLEX

UNIVERSITY OF OREGON

OWNER

University of Oregon

LOCATION

Eugene, Oregon

SIZE

145,000 SF

DATE COMPLETE

August 2013

DESIGN OVERVIEW

Akin to football players on the line of scrimmage braced to dominate their opponents, so too stands the 145,000 SF HatfieldDowlin Complex, a physical representation of the strength and innovation of the University of Oregon football program. The textured black glass façade functions as solar/glare “armor,” symbolizing the program’s ethic of stealth and complexity. It features 40-foot cantilevers that challenge gravity, similar to a football player exhibiting strength, agility and speed.

Hidden behind the walls are advanced facilities that engage student-athletes, coaches and support staff. The public lobby and reception area of the football performance center celebrate the proud accomplishments of the Oregon Ducks’ football program. The center is comprised of a weight room, diagnostic/timing track, offices for coaches/staff, team video theaters, nine position rooms, separate meeting rooms for offensive and defensive coaches and a “war room” for the entire coaching staff. Additional amenities include separate locker rooms for the players and coaches, a player’s lounge, a full-service dining facility that seats more than 200, a nutrition center, a pro scout room, a media interview room and an advanced video editing and distribution center. The site includes an enhanced grass football field and two new synthetic turf practice fields. The design solution takes advantage of the site’s natural slope; tucked under the plaza is a 190-car parking garage and plunge pools.

The project challenges the norm and expectations of design and materiality in sports facilities. The team worked closely with craftspeople/artisans, manufacturers, furniture makers, and stone and metal suppliers to add texture and richness to the monochromatic aesthetic. This attitude is carried through to the nearby Casanova Center and Moshofsky Sports Center, which were reskinned for cohesiveness. A new outdoor plaza was created, complete with a cascading fountain and benches. This serves to unite the existing facilities as a complex, creating a public hub.

Clad in glass, granite and metal, the building’s armor is a construct between strength and grace, formidability and transparency. The ground floor, as well as the meeting rooms and lounges on the mezzanine level, are clad in glass, creating a connection and transparency to outdoor spaces. The building program is divided into box-like elements of black granite, corrugated metal and fritted glass. The boxes are arranged in a “Jenga” manner that may appear unbalanced, but are interlocked as a cohesive and interdependent composition. It represents the collective strength and balance of individuals working together as a team

The body of interior spaces provides the sinew to the building facade. The interior anatomy reinforces the formidability and transparency of the armor with reflective surfaces that mirror the exterior and the movements of users within – rich wood-clad spaces contrast the starkness of the black façade and support a more focused environment and accommodation of players and coaching staff through the gracious scale. The program is based on a rigorous study of flow, scale and use, guided by proximity. Coaches worked closely with the designers to establish an ideal layout in order to maximize their goals for day-to-day use and minimize travel time. In between the rooms are spaces that encourage interaction, bridging the gap between teacher and student, coach and athlete.

The building is designed to be filled with new ideas and fresh thinking; many walls have magnetic glass, which is both durable and offers a surface for writing and working during impromptu meetings. As the users of the building spend long hours inside, the detailing and materials reflect a more tactile counterpoint to the bristling armor. From the slate to the various patinas of metal panel, all interior finishes were curated to encourage touch and comfort. Much of the hardware and furnishings were custom fabricated in order to fit seamlessly within the architecture, accommodate the weight and proportions of the football players and to synchronize with Oregon’s well-recognized Pantone yellow and green colors.

CONTRACTOR

CONSTRUCTION Hoffman Construction Company

LANDSCAPE PLACE Studio

STRUCTURAL & CIVIL KPFF

MECHANICAL Integral Group

ELECTRICAL Sparling

GEOTECHNICAL Geotechnical Resources Inc.

ACOUSTICS Altermatt Associates

PRACTICE FIELD LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT

Cameron McCarthy Gilbert & Scheibe

FOOD SERVICE CONSULTANT Hammer Design

Consultants Associates, Inc.

3D SOUND Charlie Morrow Productions

EXHIBIT DESIGN Gallagher Designs

BENCHMARKING

As part of the investigative process, the design team visited the facilities of top university programs across the country, as well as professional sports teams, including the locker room of the New York Yankees and the operations center of the New England Patriots. Each time the design team faced a world-class facility, the client would ask, “how can we make it better?” This relentless pursuit of innovation infiltrated the entire design and construction team, guiding everything from the cladding of the building to the world-class custom fabricated lockers. These trips helped inform programming and design of spaces, such as the player’s lounge. Located on the sixth floor of the office bar, this space accommodates football players in their down time, focused on recuperation and camaraderie.

DONOR

The Hatfield-Dowlin Complex was built by the charitable foundation of Nike Co-Founder Phil Knight and his wife Penny Knight. The building is named in honor of their mothers, Lota Hatfield and Dorothie Dowlin. The Knights also funded the Athletic Medicine Center and the John E. Jaqua Academic Center for Student Athletes. Taking a page out of Nike’s playbook to keep design relevant to the target customer, the design team knew the facility needed to appeal to a specific demographic—the rising stars of high school football nationwide. The building will play an important role in the recruitment and retention of Oregon’s football program.

ABOVE A three-level skybridge connects the “teaching box” and the office bar. BELOW The building program is divided into box-like elements of black granite, corrugated metal and fritted glass .

WE DON'T FOLLOW HISTORY, WE MAKE HISTORY.

OREGON IS ONE OF THE FIRST UNIVERSITIES TO PUT TOGETHER A COMPREHENSIVE PROGRAM TO TREAT THE WELL-ROUNDED SUCCESS OF ITS STUDENT-ATHLETES.

STUDENT-ATHLETES FIRST

The University of Oregon is rewriting the standard playbook with a simple premise to put student-athletes first. While many schools invest in new stadiums to lure in fans and studentathletes, Oregon is working from the ground up. It is building its program through facilities dedicated to studentathletes: an Athletic Medicine Center completed in 2007, an Academic

Center in 2010, and in August 2013 the Football Performance Center. These facilities provide a new formula and holistic approach to a healthymind-body lifestyle that builds better student-athletes. The results speak for themselves: the academic success of student-athletes is improving, players are healthier and recovering from injuries faster, and recruiting efforts are at an all-time high.

HEALTH SUCCESS

Complete with adjustable underwater treadmills and whole-body plunge pools, Oregon’s Athletic Medicine Center was the envy of all PAC-12 schools when it opened in 2007, and it continues to push boundaries today. It spurred an “arms race” for many other universities across the country to remodel and significantly improve their treatment facilities and tools.

Organizationally, the culture shifted from staff managing problems as they arise to focusing on injury prevention and athletic readiness. Now all studentathletes undergo movement screens (typically seven whole-body movements captured on film) that are graded to determine an athlete’s range of motion, flexibility, balance, etc. It provides insight into areas of weakness or limited mobility from past injuries and informs the individual treatment program designed for each student-athlete.

Students meet regularly with trainers, graduate assistants, a physician, nutritionists and the several nutrition interns on staff—whether or not they are experiencing an injury. The nutritional staff works on body composition, diet and energy levels throughout the year, and the physician keeps student-athletes healthy from head to toe, including optometry, dental and pharmaceutical needs.

ACADEMIC SUCCESS

Oregon’s John E. Jaqua Academic Center for Student Athletes opened in 2010, dedicated to improving academic achievement for student-athletes. It includes 35 tutor rooms; 25 faculty/ advising offices; a 114-seat auditorium; a conference room; a flexible classroom; a computer lab; student and faculty lounges; and “Frosh Hall,” a unique office and study space for the exclusive use of freshman student-athletes in that critical first year on campus.

The University has had a total of 84 Academic-All Americans since 1962, and 12 since the Jaqua Center opened in 2010. Oregon is ranked on the Top 50 list for Academic-All Americans out of more than 1,000 participating schools. The University has 46 more AcademicAll Americans than UC Berkeley, 21 more than the University of Washington, 22 more than Princeton and 10 more than Harvard.

This dedication to supporting academics is bolstering the GPA of student-athletes. Nearly half of all student-athletes have a 3.0 GPA, an increase of 17% since the Academic Center opened. In 2012, the women’s cross country team was voted National Division 1 Scholar Team of the Year with a GPA of 3.66 (Oregon’s first Scholar Team of the Year).

1 Large Theater/Auditorium

2 Small Theater

3 Position Meeting Rooms, Defensive

1 Player's Lounge

2 Family Lounge

3 Offices

4 Skybridge

5 Mechanical

LOBBY

The lobby resides in the “teaching box,” accessible from the plaza and Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., the main artery to the Autzen Stadium. It provides a public glimpse into the architecture of the building, and is a gathering spot for the public. It features a graphic wall of 64 TV screens that come alive with photos, action clips, and Oregon motivational films with an innovative 3D surround sound system. To support this endeavor, Nike created an internship in its sports media department to keep content in the lobby fresh, using game day and practice footage. Adjacent to the lobby, the “ring room” displays the Oregon Bowl Game commemorative rings in glass cases. Heritage pieces of the football program are visible in the lobby. At the center is a trophy case of significant football bowl game wins. A display of miniature football figures showcasing the evolution of Duck uniforms through the years flanks the entry wall.

DINING

A dining hall for all student-athletes is located east of the lobby, seating more than 200. It features slate floors, walnut wall paneling, banquettes, oversized dining tables, and access to views of the entry garden and south plaza. In addition, there is a separate but connected dining room for specific pre-game or celebratory meals. The servery and kitchen facilities are designed to provide student-athletes the highest nutrition and dietary discipline. Coaches believe “you are what you eat.”

WEIGHT ROOM

One of the most significant programmatic pieces in the Hatfield-Dowlin Complex is the weight room, a two-story volume overlooking the practice fields. This 25,000 SF facility is one of the largest dedicated football weight rooms among college teams. It is furnished with the most advanced weight-training and strengthening equipment. A 40-yard indoor diagnostic/timing track is located on the mezzanine. It electronically provides several measures of performance, including a player’s burst of speed from a standing position (a key metric used by both coaches and professional scouts). Ipe wood was used for its strength and durability, as well as the warmth it brings to the space.

PLAYER’S LOCKER ROOM

Each locker is individually ventilated to remove odor and keep the space from smelling like a typical locker facility. Student-athletes key in their code at central computers to open their locker, which includes a drop-down rack for their helmet and shoulder pads, personal storage, and a shelf for powering electronic devices. The individual doors of each locker slide back into the locker system so that players sit on long benches that face one another to connect players and build team unity. The lockers are made of Corian with a custom graphic of a football player; the player name and number can be changed every year. Special attention was paid to bacteria-resistant surfaces throughout the locker room.

ABOVE The barber chair features custom upholstery and headrest. A display case is wall mounted with tools curated from Milan. A professional barber comes in regularly.

COACHES’ LOCKER ROOM

In a seperate room specifically for the coaches, the interiors palette is richer and meant to have a spa-like feel. It includes a hydrotheraphy pool, as many of the coaches are former players with past injuries.

OFFICES

Offices for coaches are located on the fourth floor of the office bar, each provided with the most advanced technological tools to view films, generous walls of writing surfaces, and comfortable lounging areas

to encourage player and coach mentorship. Walnut and other natural wood finishes contribute to the warmth of the environment. Offices for the graduate assistants, interns and football operations support staff reside on the fifth floor.

PLAYER’S HALL

Each of the position rooms empties into the bright and open atrium space, known as Player’s Hall, on floors four and five in the teaching box. Just beyond are entrances to the large theater—one on each floor— so that players can funnel into the auditorium space quickly.

LARGE THEATER

There are two theater spaces that allow the offense and defense to meet separately. The large theater/auditorium has 170 seats made from the same Italian leather found in a Ferrari and features the Oregon “O” logo. Here the entire team can assemble before home games and strategize with a view of Autzen Stadium.

WAR ROOM

Situated in the heart of the coaches’ office floor the “war room” serves as the mission control for the facility. It has seating for 30 and can accommodate the entire coaching staff to strategize and make decisions.

MEDIA ROOM

The media room, located adjacent to both the player’s and coaches’ locker rooms, provides a dedicated space for group interviews as well as booths for individual interviews. On the wall is Nike football leather and custom Oregon graphics.

PRACTICE FIELDS

The outdoor practice fields include two synthetic turf fields, allowing both the offensive and defensive teams to practice at the same time, with the coaches and trainers located in-between. To provide multiple training surfaces, there is also a grass practice field for

drills. Two sprinting ramps of differing slopes condition players for power and speed. Adjacent to the fields and tucked underneath the weight room are two plunge pools to help players reduce recovery time during and after training.

PLAYER’S LOUNGE

The player’s lounge serves as a place for players to rest, recuperate, and interact with teammates. It includes soft seating, televisions, game stations, a pool table, and a fooseball table. On the custom carpet, the University’s fighting duck mascot is taking on the other mascots of the PAC-12. Two parallel vierendeel trusses are supported by the stair towers of the office bar and span the height and length of the sixth floor. Floors four and five hang from these trusses from a series of tension rods, allowing for column-free offices below.

SUSTAINABILITY

One of the building’s most visible sustainable features are the “sunglasses” on the West exterior of the facility. These exterior glass screens are hung at a distance of five feet from the glass façade, functioning as a glare control and thermal heat barrier for the office bar. They allow light in but help block heat, allowing the building to operate with less dependence on air conditioning. The high-performing, triple-glazed glass is coated with a tint that reduces glare and reinforces the notion of “armor” on the building.

The facility is designed to continue the University’s commitment to sustainability and exceeds the Oregon State Energy Efficiency Design (SEED) guidelines for energy efficiency. The predicted energy use intensity is 46.6 kBtu/SF year, which is 26% more efficient than a baseline code building. Energy efficient heating and cooling strategies include radiant heating and cooling in the lobby and dining room; night flushing of building mass; and the use of thermafusers rather than traditional VAV boxes that automatically sense the temperature and open or close to meet the temperature requirement in the office bar, minimizing reheat and eliminating overcooling. Ventilation-related loads were reduced by energy recovery in the locker room, variable-speed fans in the kitchen, displacement ventilation in the large team theater, and demandcontrolled ventilation strategies that couple ventilation rates to occupant density.

By utilizing quality materials, the Football Performance Center was designed for longevity. Ultimately, this is a more sustainable approach in that it uses fewer resources and generates less waste. Also, it provides the athletic program with a prized space and a highquality environment that is more likely to be cared for and respected. The University has seen this result with

the Athletic Medicine Center, now more than six years old and showing little wear and tear. The studentathletes and staff help take care of it, with the intention of passing it along to Oregon’s next generation of student-athletes.