New Building at YVCC Opens for Public Tuesday

Yakima Valley Community College will host the Palmer Martin Hall Grand Opening Celebration at 2 p.m. The ceremony will take place outside the main entrance of Palmer Martin Hall on the south side of YVCC’s Yakima Campus, South 16th Avenue and Nob Hill Boulevard.

The new instructional building is home to arts, communication studies, education and modern language instruction. The building will contain classrooms, art studios, digital art, language and speech labs, faculty offices, plus a seminar room and study spaces.

The new hall was designed by Yakima firm BORArchitecture, PLLC, and built by Yakima contractor G.H. Moen, LLC. Both companies have a long history with YVCC and have been instrumental in developing the footprint of YVCC's Yakima and Grandview campuses. G.H. Moen built YVCC’s original building, Prior Hall, in 1949.

Architects Sheri Brockway and Allen Opfer, along with their team, have worked closely with the college's faculty and staff to create meaningful instruction and study spaces for students. The firm provided an environmentally sensitive concept of sustainable architecture with the use of natural light, low energy consumption and organic, renewable resource materials that are energy efficient to produce with minimum waste. In addition, a solar panel array is installed on the roof.

Palmer Martin Hall is registered with the LEED® (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) green building program with a certification goal of Gold, as established by the U.S. Green Building Council and verified by the Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI).

Also unique to this building project is the artwork of Northwest artist Kay Kirkpatrick. Selected by YVCC’s Arts Selection Committee, Kirkpatrick’s work was commissioned as part of the Washington State Arts Commission’s Art in Public Places Program. The Washington Legislature established the Art in Public Places Program in 1974 to acquire artwork for K-12 public schools, colleges, universities and state agencies, funded by .5 of 1 percent of the state's portion of construction costs.

Kirkpatrick worked collaboratively with the college and the architects to incorporate her vision into Palmer Martin Hall’s design. Using etched concrete, fritted glass, aluminum, stainless steel and colored glass, Kirkpatrick created “Storylines” inspired by the idea behind the Ititamatpama of keeping a storyline and remembering the events of our lives. Kirkpatrick’s description of her work states, “The Ititamatpama were memory devices used by the Yakama Tribal women prior to the use of written language. These were balls of string or yarn a woman would make, knotted with beads, shells and other things, marking important points in her life; making a diary without words. They could be rolled out when needed to act as mnemonic devices to help recall days past or recount life events.” Rather than beads and string Kirkpatricks’s artwork uses a combination of string and bead images layered with words and language primarily drawn from the writing and life stories contributed by students at YVCC. It reflects the rich cultural diversity of the area, and the planned use of the building as a language and visual arts teaching facility.