Austin, Texas, USA

Tucked into the park’s hilly western edge, Kingsbury Commons at Pease Park in Austin is a new common space that includes one partially restored building and two buildings designed by Nathan Quiring and Hanna Ward of Clayton Korte for the Pease Park Conservancy of the City of Austin Parks and Recreation Department.

For its inspired and well-rounded design, Kingsbury Commons at Pease Park has recently been awarded a 2022 American Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.

Known as Austin’s first park, this 84-acre public green space has a rich history spanning from ancestral native civilizations to the city’s founding mothers and fathers and its popularity endures with Austinites today.

The park’s rehabilitation, preservation, and enhancement of natural features affect the park’s southernmost tip, affectionately referred to as its “recreational heart and cultural soul,” and is the first phase to be implemented in the Master Plan.

Built in the 1920s, the Tudor Cottage is one of the earliest park facility buildings constructed in Austin.

The picturesque little building, originally built as a restroom, is in the Tudor Revival Style and sits on a bluff overlooking the southern end of the park. 

Its proximity to the hub of the park’s activity makes it an ideally situated event venue.

Interior walls are removed to open the space up into a single room, and a new roof structure allows a vaulted ceiling (while keeping the existing wood shake roof in place) to create a more expansive sense of space.

The exterior is treated with a light touch, except for the north side where a new large glazed opening connects the interior with views of the expansive terraces leading out to the park.

Two new buildings, known as Kingsbury Pavilion, will serve to support the park.

As support buildings, they are deferential to the rest of the park. 

Accordingly, the buildings are pushed to the park’s western edge where they tuck into a hillside slope.

With a color palette inspired by the tree-covered hillside and walls of mesh, the buildings recede into the background.

A restroom building is organized like a classic dogtrot, with the vanities in the breezeway, looking through the building into the woods beyond.

The storage building opens up to a new courtyard connecting the two buildings, where park visitors and volunteers can congregate.

With amphitheater-like seating built into the hillside, this space is the perfect spot to organize park volunteer workdays or just rest in the shade.

The new buildings each have three concrete walls, with a narrow vertical board form.

The remaining side which faces the trail, and the continuous open-air clerestory, is comprised of a structural steel frame and steel mesh panels, with steel sheets behind at select locations, all left to age and weather. 

The interior walls have painted steel panels, and the roof is painted (pre-finished) steel.

Project: Kingsbury Commons at Pease Park
Architects: Clayton Korte
Lead Architects: Nathan Quiring and Hanna Ward
Contractor: Harvey-Cleary Builders
Client: Pease Park Conservancy, City of Austin Parks and Recreation Department
Photographers: Casey Dunn