Rancho San Ramon

The Rancho San Ramon Park Project includes four buildings for which OTA+ (with Mork-Ulnes Architects) was the architect and SWA Group was the landscape designer and in charge of the master plan. The buildings include a restroom/storage building, restroom, storage building and pump house.

The project called for a series of public restrooms, storage and mechanical rooms to support the program of the Rancho San Ramon Community Park. The client requested an aesthetic resembling a worn down Napa barn, so we were limited with our material palette to weathered cedar boards and rusted steel roofs. However, the need to differentiate each building within a common aesthetic provided an opportunity to introduce variation through a set of shared features. The buildings were also required to be low maintenance, so performative criteria such as graffiti-resistance and daylighting drove many of the surface and massing decisions.

We used either a gable or pitched roof form depending on the orientation of each building on the site, allowing light to enter the side or front/back of the building to reduce the need for artificial interior lighting. Each clerestory is covered by cedar planks. The spacing between each plank was determined by physical lighting simulations calculated in the software 3ds Max. We were able to modulate the exact spacing between planks based on the optimum daylighting solution for any particular building orientation and configuration. Furthermore, the cedar siding board pattern varies to deter graffiti. It has been proven that vandals are less likely to graffiti surfaces with uneven and irregular patterns, so the amount of pattern variation corresponds to the variation of the boards and area/flatness of the surface at any given point on the building.