Austin Community College Highland Campus Phase II

The Highland Mall was once a bustling commercial center before becoming a cavernous, 700,000-sf shell. Austin Community College transformed the shuttered property into a cohesive campus for specialty programs. Phase II converted the former mall’s central portion into a business incubator, health sciences simulation center, multimedia art gallery, culinary arts center, and spaces serving a dozen ACC programs. The project addressed the unique needs of each discipline while overcoming shortcomings of 1970s mall construction. A former interior corridor became a paseo, transforming a windowless atrium into an open, inviting space that encourages interdisciplinary collaboration and community interaction; steel removed for this purpose was reused to frame jewel boxes designed for student interaction. The LEED Gold–certified project provides state-of-the-art training facilities while demonstrating how adaptive reuse can reanimate vacant structures and their immediate vicinities. 

“This just felt like an incredible ecosystem of different programs that are going to enrich the community college experience. We were particularly impressed with the careful reuse not just of the overall structure, but also of materials in some of the smaller pavilions that were inserted. There was a real care of materials that ran all the way through the project, from the urban scale down to the detail of a stair.” —Ashley Rao, AIA

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