Rocky Top Dining Hall at UTK Earns BIA's Brick in Architecture Award

Simmons STUDIO Architects and Johnson Architecture of Knoxville earned a Brick in Architecture Award from the Brick Industry Association for their co-designed 1,200 seat dining hall. The Rocky Top facility is the new hub of student life at UT Knoxville, and the centerpiece of the West Campus Redevelopment project at the University of Tennessee, a collection of collegiate neo-Gothic structures weaved together with a rich fabric of brick, stone and clay tile roofs. The project captured the Silver Higher Education 2023 Award from the BIA.

The $42.5M project uses over 300,000 bricks from General Shale Brick Co., laid by Gentry & Painter, Inc., and features a monumental brick hearth in the fifty foot tall main dining hall. “The sustainable choice for 100-year building design is masonry, and the durable beauty of the material continues to shine in high-performance building design,” notes Bob Simmons, founder of Simmons STUDIO Architects.

Atrium Stair Robert Batey Photography

West Campus Dining Commons and Pedestrian Promenade Robert Batey Photography

Reinventing Dining for a Pandemic-Prepared World

al Fresco Dining Pavilion Opens to the Sky via Retractable Fabric Roof

How do campuses and companies, both large and small, provide safe gathering for dining in a pandemic and prepare for the next one? In a conceptual design study for a major northeastern college, Simmons STUDIO proposed creating an adaptable al fresco dining pavilion. It is adaptable to be open to the sky, or on rainy or hot days, the translucent fabric roof can close to create a shady and weathertight area. Steam-heated bench seats, and radiant panels allow for sustainable comfort all year round, with fresh air in abundance.

Two covered open-air cooking venues will serve the area to provide food with an extremely low carbon footprint. The design eliminates the extremely wasteful exhaust hood ventilation that is required indoors, which involves heating outside air, and then immediately expelling it through an expensive exhaust system, which produces massive GHG emissions. Learn more...

Dining Pavilion Can Also Double as an Outdoor Sheltered Event Venue

Transformation: Claustrophobic Bungalow to Sun-Drenched Family Hub

A young Newton couple wanted the living level of their home to be fully open - to function as one resplendent and unified family life space; a space they could survey easily with their active young children in mind, but also celebrate and support lots of family entertaining. Learn more…

SimmonsSTUDIO Lives GREEN: Living Futures Product Expo '19

SimmonsSTUDIO visited Nashville to learn about the latest innovations in healthy materials and products, and spoke with several keynote speakers like Olie Mughelli, who’s foundation is striving to make breakthroughs in sustainability in people-of-color communities. Learn more.

We also visited Vanderbilt’s Living Building Petal Project on their Peabody campus currently under construction, and led by Keith Loiseau, Campus Architect, and Paul Marshal, VU’s Project Manager.

Vanderbilt Peabody Campus Petal Project in Construction

Decon + Reuse '19: The Growing Deconstruction Movement

Decon + Reuse ‘19

Project Re (Reuse)

with Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture

SimmonsSTUDIO learned much about straddling the many hurdles involved in material reuse at the Decon + Reuse conference, an organization that promotes the reuse of buildings and their materials over demolition - a better way to avoid mixed construction demolition debris from filling landfills and adding to CO2 into the atmosphere. The movement is growing stronger each year, and is a surprisingly cost effective way to sequester carbon in the reconstruction process.

We toured Project Re, a project designed in conjunction with Carnegie-Mellon School of Architecture, to showcase the systematic reuse of material types at Pittsburgh’s Construction Junction. The portal entry features amazingly transformed hollow-core doors salvaged from residential buildings and re-purposed.

Learn more at Decon + Reuse and view their presentation material from several US and international speakers.