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- #BUCK REC CENTER PICTURES OF WALKING TRACKS FULL#
- #BUCK REC CENTER PICTURES OF WALKING TRACKS WINDOWS#
This long running program has its own entrance and parking lot located on Venture Avenue. The Recreation Center also houses the Preschool Program on the north side of the building. The field house provides capabilities for the Department to host large indoor events.
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This large facility contains a 22,000-square-foot field house, which is comprised of two basketball courts, an exercise area, a 590-foot indoor loop track, and men’s and women’s locker rooms. Designers also specified a system of low-tech stoplights along the straightaways to further ensure that all traffic goes in the same direction.Description: The Recreation Center, or ‘Rec Center’, is our primary indoor recreation facility and the hub of indoor recreational programs and activities offered by the Brunswick Parks and Recreation Department. The track itself is striped - the standard three lanes, two for walking/jogging side by side and one passing lane - in a way that merges runners through the intersections and discourages runners from going against oncoming traffic.
#BUCK REC CENTER PICTURES OF WALKING TRACKS FULL#
The full one-third-mile track circles both gyms track users can choose to circle the two gyms separately or together for ovals of different distances, or run the crossover and return by way of the first intersection. The other side of the Auburn track is suspended above adjacent four-court and two-court gyms, and circles them entirely, so that different routes are available to walkers and joggers. The Auburn building is particularly large, but the existence of large atrium spaces in many rec centers suggests a way to gain additional distance by taking advantage of these buildings' vertical dimension. The number of laps per mile has normally been a function solely of the size of the gymnasium it winds around. Part of the new era of tracks has them becoming an element that is part circulation, part apparatus, allowing building owners (and users) to do more with less. In this way, the track begins to function as fitness equipment, specifically a treadmill and its ability to offer interval training. The track has to rise through the space to an additional loft level and back down again to achieve the crossover. In the end, the students rejected Formula One in favor of what they've begun calling "Hot Wheels" - suggested by the design decision to highlight the track throughout the space in the AU color of burnt orange. Among the more high-concept plans was a Formula One-style track featuring tighter, hairpin-style turns and a more compressed, "competitive" circuit. The large-volume space allowed designers' minds to fly free, and several track concepts were developed. Simply put, it is hard to overstate the value that a signature track can bring to the overall program.Īuburn's students requested something distinctive, something that would set its rec center apart from every other, and they considered a track desirable because it would give them a safe place to run at night, when the majority of fitness activities take place.
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Moreover, tracks are people movers, and a track that moves people through the entire facility serves a facility owner's larger purpose of engaging people in activity and suggesting new activities for them to try by exposing them to the rest of the rec center program.
#BUCK REC CENTER PICTURES OF WALKING TRACKS WINDOWS#
Runners, on the other hand, are in constant motion, and runners flashing by exterior windows can't help but attract the eye. Climbing walls have recently served most often as the grand rec center statement, soaring into big-volume atrium space or inhabiting glassed towers designed specifically to elicit "Wows" from passersby, but whatever their grandeur as structural elements, climbing walls are static, and climbers appear at a glance to be pinned to the surface. These windows also serve the secondary purpose of showcasing activity.Īnd so jogging tracks by and large remain confined to the gym - which is a shame, because tracks are particularly good elements to bring the message of activity to the wider world.
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Rec center design has come a long way in 20 years, and advances in glass in particular have given designers a way to open up the gymnasium box to allow runners glimpses or extended views of the world outside the gym, whether of the surrounding campus or the building's other internal spaces. It's no wonder that many older tracks end up underutilized. Such tracks are utilitarian at best - four straightaways, four sharp left or right turns (depending on the day of the week). The reason isn't lack of vision by owner or designer, but simply that the most logical and cost-effective place for them is suspended around the gymnasium's two-story space, in building volume that would otherwise be wasted. Tracks in many rec centers appear as afterthoughts.
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