Breaking Down a Big Box, Building Up Community

Rush County’s new Love Community Center is designed to promote connectivity, growth, and togetherness by co-locating vital social, economic, and physical community services. Organized around a central zone called Main Street the project uses the building’s large, open volume to provide a welcoming public space that allows visitors to see everything the center offers, including the Rushville Public Library, the Rush County Community Assistance Food Pantry, a new childcare center, shared office space for social service agencies, and a fitness center with a family pool and basketball court.

To help bring new life to the exterior of an abandoned Walmart store, we updated the façade, created a new entry canopy, and transformed the parking lot into a public plaza. These changes were designed to help change public perception about the building and create a new narrative about its place in the community. Façade improvements enhance the thermal efficiency of the center and by increasing the amount of natural daylight coming into the building we created a more uplifting environment while helping to reduce lighting loads.

In towns of all sizes, ghost retail buildings offer opportunities to take advantage of the embodied carbon in an existing building while adding new amenities, value, and community connection.

For more about our work on the Love Community Center, read our insight here. Read more about our adaptive reuse projects here.