The design brief for the Employee Hub at the Dollar General Distribution Center in Bessemer Alabama discussed extensively the need for employee safety, wellness and comfort.  While its business was booming, the company was struggling with employee retention.  With an employee roster of over 600 for each distribution center and the famously tight ... read more

The design brief for the Employee Hub at the Dollar General Distribution Center in Bessemer Alabama discussed extensively the need for employee safety, wellness and comfort.  While its business was booming, the company was struggling with employee retention.  With an employee roster of over 600 for each distribution center and the famously tight margins for businesses of this type, employee spaces were necessary components but not necessarily considered. 
The focus expanded to include architecture as a vital component of employee wellness in support of the client’s mission and bottom line.  The project attempts to find an architecture within the context, not of the locale, but within the system and components of the distribution network. The work embraces the dogma of trucking, its aesthetic and transience, to create supportive and performative places for employee interaction, safety and comfort.
As an adjunct to the 900,000sf warehouse, the employee hub incorporates lockers rooms, restrooms, a large vending, a cafeteria/meeting hall (capacity 600), and an elevated skyway.  The meeting hall is oriented to advantage southern light through its diffuse wall, while its glazed ends provide perspective of docking operations. The material palette – translucent glazing, oriented strand board, steel, and company logo wall – all derive from trucks and transportation containers.   With these trucking components the design explores materiality, phenomenality, and the production of mood and atmosphere with a determinate, but non-representational value. 
The sky bridge together with the figure of the meeting hall begins to develop a scale that is in dialogue with the enormity of the warehouse structure.  The enlarged truck tread pattern embedded into the pre-cast concrete panels for this area provide differentiation and ownership for this portion of the building while also reinforcing a symbolic authority of architecture.  
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