BAU_Butzer Architects and Urbanism

This adaptive reuse project saw the redevelopment of a defunct 1970s shopping mall into the AIA award-winning home of Oklahoma City’s largest newspaper.

Heralded in the 1970s as a premiere shopping destination, by the early 2000s, the Century Center was home to just one tenant and 95,000 square feet of failed retail development. With growing attention to Oklahoma City’s urban core, including two University of Oklahoma architecture studios led by Hans Butzer that looked specifically at the Century Center, its owners pursued redevelopment. Over a period of four years, a new owner and vision coalesced with the “new” Century Center featuring the state’s largest newspaper as its primary tenant.

The tenant concept for The Oklahoman maximizes the potential for the former mall’s two-story central atrium. It is now a high-energy space that celebrates the dynamism of reporting life’s events. Like a paper in printing, the atrium’s white wrapper blots out lines of light and void. Employees and leadership rally around this renewed space into which visitors enter, and over which its board of directors keep watch.

The choice to remove the building’s original exterior concrete panels breathed life into its interiors. Heat mitigation drives its new diaphanous steel mesh skin, while the transparent dialogue between the public and its press is restored. A new steel exoskeleton replaces the seismic bracing lost when the precast panels were removed. To help redefine the sidewalk edge, the ferrous frame expands westwards to greet pedestrians.