USFSP RESIDENCE HALL

Background

In St. Petersburg, buried amongst the trees and often overlooked in favor of nearby Tampa, is a public university that continues to break records.

The University of South Florida has quickly gone from a modest regional school to the fastest-growing public university not just in Florida, but the entire county two years running. This research university, often known for degrees in health professions and business management, has moved to expand both horizontally and vertically across its three main campuses as USF caters towards broader demographics.

Their sustained growth meant that university officials needed to accommodate the influx of students to the St. Petersburg campus with a new structure designed to serve as a place where students could sleep, eat, and study.

The construction needed to account for future growth as well as serve the growing needs of students. Given the campus’s location on the Pinellas peninsula (itself on the Florida peninsula), the structure needed to serve multiple lifestyle needs that otherwise may have encompassed multiple buildings.

The resulting 375-bed facility, Osprey Suites, was designed with the lifestyle of students in mind. The structure offers a new dining hall, as well as a community kitchen and laundry facilities within its first floor—supplying the much-needed infrastructure to feed and host the hundreds of students living in suite-style dorms on the floors above.

The building’s positioning—nestled on the edge of campus and less than a mile to the sea—meaning that officials needed a building that evoked the pre-existing architecture of campus as well as offered a natural, durable finish to survive the elements.

Nawkaw’s Certified Stain Applicators were able to deliver on both using the transformative power of a concrete stain and a powerful potassium-silicate binder, which bonds chemically to the under- ling substrate.

The school’s official colors were recreated for the housing structure. First, a deep, opaque ivy green was rendered and applied to window fixtures and on an accent band alongside the building’s breezeway. The school’s gold color, rendered on the building as a bright lively yellow, was applied in a lower opacity— bringing out the natural beauty and texture of the concrete underneath.

The finished structure stands proudly in St. Petersburg’s innovation district, ready to handle not only the elements but the next generation of students as well!