Fire Station No. 5

San Diego, California

Fire Station No. 5 is a two-story structure of 10,597 S.F. built to a minimal budget. It contains 9 dorm rooms, a kitchen/dining room, dayroom, watch room, exercise room, lounge and three bays for apparatus.

Like all functional fire stations, the design is purpose-driven, delivering the firefighters to their apparatus in as few seconds as possible.

Unlike most fire stations, the facility has three other goals:

• Minimize energy use with an extensive and complete daylighting strategy. Rooms are arranged around a central light court. Light tubes and skylights naturally illuminate the hallways, stair and equipment bay making it unnecessary to turn on fixtures during day.
• Increase the facility’s “neighborliness” with an extroverted streetside balcony above the more private BBQ courtyard below and make the watch room as transparent to the street as possible.
• Manipulate the scale of the modest two-story stucco building to punctuate the strip commercial quality of University Ave. with a subtle civic presence.