Midlands Technical College
Columbia, SC

Project Strategy

Midlands Technical College is part of the South Carolina Technical College System. One of the state’s largest two-year colleges, enrolls approximately 25,000 students annually that seek to develop career-skills or transfer to a four-year institution.

The Boudreaux firm was tasked with designing a new public building for one of the campuses with the goal for classrooms and laboratories to be shared by multiple departments for maximum utilization and activation. The design and materiality of the project play a significant role in bringing a cohesive language that welcomes visitors and will also stand the test of time of heavy educational use.

A "language of angles" appears throughout the building's primary, secondary, and tertiary design elements. The angled entry wall of the first floor Multipurpose Room opens to welcome outside visitors. Hyper scale and color zones draw your eye across the public spaces of the first and second floor where students and the public flow from exterior to interior and are invited to congregate and interact.

Soft flooring features in the Multipurpose Room utilizing J+J's Kinetex product were chosen to deliver performance and design. The room will play host to everything from lectures to stakeholder luncheons to graduations; therefore, the flooring selection had to be durable, cleanable, improve sound attenuation, and most of all reinforce the "language of angles" at a subtle but energetic scale.

Flooring selections further continue the finer grain of angles and reinforce the school's iconic blue. J+J's Kinetex product features again in the corridor of the primary classroom floor where durability and sound attenuation were paramount performance features to encourage students to gather in the corridors without disrupting ongoing classes.

The student experience is given visual consistency and dimension with the textile-like striations of color on the laboratory floor using Mohawk Group's Lineate product. With the product’s use of color and scale combined with maximum durability, cleanability from chemicals and resistance to heavy cart traffic, Lineate was the right fit for the floor.

Celia Mackintosh, IIDA NCIDQ, with Boudreaux states “The project's flooring creates a hierarchy of design that leads both students and the public through a design with many components, inviting occupants to pause, reflect, or gather on surfaces that are appropriate to the status, use, and endurance of this new building.” Bonitz along with Hood Construction were pleased to help execute the design and deliver the monumental building for Midlands Technical College.