CVCC Regional Innovation Complex & Hickory Aviation Museum
A decades-long volunteer effort to save decommissioned military aircraft creates a new home in Hickory shared with Catawba Valley Community College.
Brothers Kyle and Kregg Kirby spent decades rescuing and restoring decommissioned U.S. military aircrafts, building a collection with nowhere permanent to go. Their collection became the genesis of this project: a partnership between the City of Hickory, the Hickory Aviation Museum, and Catawba Valley Community College (CVCC) that secured funding for a single building serving two missions: a gallery to protect and display the museum's aircrafts and a new CVCC campus location for automotive and aviation maintenance training.
The scale required to house both programs, a 60,000-square-foot museum hangar alongside 42,500 square feet of college space, pushed the design toward three connected buildings rather than one: two pre-engineered metal structures and a three-story steel-framed building holding CVCC's classrooms, offices, and shared lobby, plus shell space for a future restaurant overlooking the Hickory Regional Airport runway. An L-shaped, free-standing firewall separates the three volumes, a structural necessity that also organizes the building from the inside.
The shared lobby announces the building's identity immediately with a Marine attack helicopter suspended overhead, three stories up. In the museum hangar itself, a free-standing volume holds the museum's office and an orientation theater, its roof doubling as a mezzanine that puts visitors at eye level with the aircraft suspended from the structure above. For CVCC, a virtual simulation lab allows students to train on VR-operated equipment alongside the high-bay space built for hands-on automotive and aircraft repair work.
The collection finally has a home, and the region finally has a place to train the people who keep aircraft flying.
This project was completed by John McLean while employed with Mcmillan Pazdan Smith.
