“As a civic building, it wants to be open and express its accessibility. Transparency should be figurative and literal. The community should feel, ‘This is our building; this is where we are welcome.’ If I lived there, I would feel like this building was built to welcome me.”
— Douglass Alligood, AIA, NOMA
Location Princeton
Client City of Princeton
Architect Perkins&Will
Design Team Robert Sing Ting, AIA, Meredith Hunt, Assoc. AIA, Ron Stelmarski, FAIA, John Strasius, AIA, Lauren Mereness, Kevin Mereness
Contractor Crossland Construction
Structural Engineer Click Engineering
MEP Engineer MEPCE
Lighting Design Essential Light Design Studio
Interior Design & Branding Perkins&Will
Landscape Architect Kimley-Horn
To encourage civic engagement within Princeton as its population begins to skyrocket, the new city hall was designed in tandem with a family development. The police department, parks and recreation department, and city government are welded into one building to encourage communication across jurisdictions and to give citizens more immediate access to their civil servants. The building’s materiality celebrates the city’s history as a farming town with regional building materials and dark velour brick referencing the Blackland Prairie soil. The site itself creates another layer of the public realm with a park system that blends into the neighborhood. Non-invasive indigenous trees and shrubs were added to encourage biodiversity, and rainwater is collected and deposited into an existing playa lake to keep the site healthy.