The client for the IntraCenter is the Community School That Never Closes Initiative, a non-profit organization based in Lexington, Kentucky. The CSTNCI provides educational and social opportunities to disadvantaged children and adults. The program includes cultural facilities, a health clinic, a day care center, a fitness center, a swimming pool, and various human services agencies.

Our work began with a programming phase, during which it became apparent that the impetus to hybridize functions required no prompting at all from us as architects. From the outset, our clients articulated a sophisticated understanding of the merits of a facility in which a building’s overall programmatic composition could be made to be more than the sum of its parts.

These insights, coming from the “layperson” side of the table, prompted us to realize that the idea of hybridization has reached a kind of maturity today. As a result, our research focused on a definition of the “figure” (or what we came to term the “quasi-figure”) of hybridity rather than on the simple notion of functional mixing, In short, the design of the IntraCenter is unabashed in its investigation of the relationship between program and form, willfully exploiting either one of them to accelerate the other.

Our research took us through five stages. In the first, we focused on the articulation of our premise: “program’” and “form” can be concentric, semi-concentric, or non-concentric, and each of these possibilities gives architecture a means of delineating the figure of programmatic hybridity. Second, we developed an architectural strategy: a series of spatial “parentheses” that are used to bracket subsets of the building’s overall program. In the third stage, we introduced the program into a building envelope whose limits were determined by site conditions. Fourth, we investigated the permutations and combinations of spatial organizations ensuing from the cross-fertilization of the parentheses and the program. Finally, we explored the architectural ramifications of the parenthesis/program relationship with regard to structure, mechanical systems, circulation, and egress requirements.

The resulting building tethers form and program to one another, all the while refusing their complete concurrence. Within this near-coincidence of spaces-among the nested parentheses-the IntraCenter’s inhabitants will find a continually legible, and perpetually changing, landscape of spatial and programmatic opportunities.