Mixed Use

At the end of the 20th Century, the City of Aiken completed a successful Streetscape program, which enhanced it’s downtown by adding brick pavers, cross-walks, lamp posts, and street trees.  The goal of offering evening activities would require more than attractive downtown aesthetics.

Ideally, a healthy downtown would include residents enjoying downtown restaurants, theatres, and outdoor musical events.  A key component to achieve this was to establish a performing arts theatre, which would draw people downtown for evening performances and to enjoy the increasing number of restaurants available to theatre-goers.

The Aiken Downtown Development Corporation had identified a vacant movie theatre, which was thought to be an ideal location for the Aiken Community Playhouse, in existence for many years on the outskirts of Aiken.  Upon further investigation, it became clear that the movie theatre did not have adequate back-stage areas nor ceiling clearances for a working theatre.  As the HBOL design team shifted to a new building solution for this site on Newberry Street, a local SRS-related company expressed an interest in locating a new office headquarters in the downtown area.  This lead to the current two-story office headquarters for Ammentum Corporation and the Aiken Community Playhouse with a shared lobby.

The new building would be constructed on a relatively tight site adjacent to the historic court-tennis building, which served as an architectural reference in its scale and brickwork.  The entrance lobby is flanked by vertical tower elements reminiscent of Aiken’s Grand Hotels once serving Aiken in the earliest 20th Century.