Ogden Front Climbing Club Addition

The renovation of the Ogden Front Climbing Club’s north entry is at once a significant and small scale renovation. The new entry is an extension of a loading dock – a small outcropping on the side of a transparent facade – where a transition space is gathered between the street and the gym interior. The project responds to the surrounding scale and materiality of the adjacent facades on the historical American Can Company (built in 1914) and reinterprets them in terms of material and technology. The new entry seeks to add new life to the streetscape with a broad set of steps, a wide porch, and a terrace that extends from the climbing area.

The exterior wall is articulated in rainscreen of galvanized folded steel plates that borrow their dimensions from the multi-pane steel windows of the original building. The entry itself is contemporary, but nods to the historic character of its context, harkening to the pragmatic rigor and rich tectonic experience of Albert Kahn.