Huge Agricultural Expo Project Wins Award

An innovative project that is raising the stature of the World Dairy Expo and the Midwest Horse Fair in Madison, Wisconsin, was honored by In Business Madison and its 2015 Commercial Design Awards.

The 290,000-square-foot Alliant Energy Center New Holland Pavilions project was designed with aesthetics that go beyond the expectations for agricultural expo facilities, one judge noted in the In Business article about the CDA Best Large Project award.

The former SAA Design group, now part of Ayres Associates, provided site/civil design for the project, for which Strang Inc. provided architectural/interior design and R.A. Smith National Inc. (formerly Arnold & O’Sheridan) provided structural engineering.

The site design effort involved reconstructing a 12-acre area in the middle of the fully developed Alliant Energy Center campus, Katie explains. Two massive pavilion buildings, approximately the size of five NFL football fields, were designed to occupy the footprint of 12 existing agricultural barns. The original barns occupied an area surrounded by asphalt parking lots, with over 8 feet of variation in elevation across the building site. The site design team focused on maintaining Americans with Disabilities Act walkable access to the entire building envelope perimeters, massaging the site grades to fit the existing surroundings, improving existing stormwater flooding issues on the campus, and working with the vast network of undocumented utilities in the project site.

The new pavilions include livestock stalls, wash bays, a milking parlor, and restrooms with showers. While built to fit the needs of the largely agricultural users, the facilities raise the bar in terms of aesthetics. “It almost looks like you could house a boxing match or a basketball tournament in there,” one judge says in the In Business article.