Arizona State University

Media & Immersive eXperience Center

City of Tempe

Clark Park Community Center & Pool

Since opening in 1949, Clark Park has been a beloved neighborhood gathering place, complete with pool, rec center, garden and sports fields. In the time since, it had fallen into disrepair with the pool no longer functioning, weathered structures and lifeless landscape taking the place of active participation by residents. When the Pandemic hit, the City of Tempe mobilized to bring this place back to life. Human connection, especially outside had never been so important.

Overview

The project team, led by landscape partners Dig Studio, began by talking to folks who lived around the park, many of whom had grown up there and remembered better days among the Cypress, Elm, Palm and Ash trees. At first, the program was limited to creating a few shade structures and a locker room for what would become the new pool. As the community spoke up, the project grew into a multifaceted recreation center – open to all sides of the park, and available for classes, gatherings, performances and special events, in addition to a safe landing pad for the aquatics activities to come.
Site

Clark Park underwent a series of incidental improvements over the course of several decades, without significant attention to fully conserving the existing ecosystem. The park boasts a handful of large shade trees supported by legacy flood irrigation, with deteriorating paths as obstacles to and from gathering zones.

The new design preserved and enhanced the existing natural habitat by re-aligning circulation paths and a cohesive shade network, along with new desert adapted plantings, and pollinator gardens to support local bees and other migratory pollinating species. The relocation of the popular Community Garden enhanced existing landscaping, vegetation and created additional beds for broader use. The Saturday Farmer’s Market is back in action encouraging local participation, routine preservation and maintenance, and environmental education opportunities. A significant decrease in the heat-island at Clark park was the result of new pervious paving strategies at walkways, gathering zones and parking stalls along the project’s perimeter.
Building Design

Wrapped with (recycled content) cementitious fiber panels, the pavilion-like structure grows out of the new native landscaping, is daylit, and infused with fresh air by operable windows throughout. The new building (and resulting park + pool + garden + dog run) has become the epicenter for the community once again.

The design responds to the surrounding neighborhood scale with a low roof form and wood ceiling canopy that floats above open gathering spaces that expand the program occurring within. Deliberate interior sight-lines connect each space, allowing for direct engagement with staff at all locations. City-funded art installations by artist Nicole Meuller lend identity and vibrance with lithomosaic murals and kiln-formed glass for colored clerestories and skylights that embrace the changing light of the Arizona desert – sunrise to sunset.
Impact

Addressing community vulnerabilities is a common theme for recreation buildings across every socio-economic group. The building addresses the needs of a changing populace by remaining adaptable as the City’s means and methods toward serving its citizens evolve. This project reacts to real challenges of keeping human beings connected and healthy. Ideally, it serves as a model for other communities desperately in need of places with reliable program usability, functionality and value.

While not all measures proposed by the team were adopted into the final design, this ethos is evident in several components: the building’s orientation to the park to serve large gatherings, events, or emergency situations; a porous enclosure design that opens the building to provide services such as food / clothing distribution or emergency shelter; flexible office spaces both within the building and at the adjacent pool maintenance facility to serve any City of Tempe Department’s future needs.

As with people, all buildings must change, it is in the clarity of the plan, the durability of the details and the ways in which clients can take ownership of place that creates the most long lasting and durable effects, making that necessary change even more beautiful over time.
Location
Tempe, Arizona
Project Owner
City of Tempe
Cost
$10.8m
Size
12,000 square feet
Completion
April 2024
Prime Consultant & Landscape Architecture
Dig Studio
Construction Manager at Risk
Haydon Companies
Civil Engineer
Wood Patel
Structural Engineering
Pangolin Engineering
M.E.P. Engineering
Innovative Construction & Design Solutions
Aquatics Design
AquaDesign International
Photography
Grey Shed Studio
Arizona Forward
Environmental Excellence Award 2025
AIA Arizona
Distinguished Architecture Award 2024
Engineering News Record Southwest
Best Project Award 2024