Budweiser Clydesdales luxuriating in
Aggie-designed facility in Missouri

 

They’re in Budweiser ads, parades and special events across the country — the Clydesdales: magnificent, distinctive horses, one of the world’s top corporate icons in the world, will be bred and reared in a state-of-the art breeding facility in Missouri that was designed by Charlie Kolarik, a former student at Texas A&M’s College of Architecture.

Kolarik, who earned a Bachelor of Environmental Design degree in 2002 and a Master of Architecture degree in 2004, is a project architect at gh2 Gralla Equestrian Architects in Norman, Okla. At the firm’s Norman office 12 other architects work solely on equestrian projects throughout the world; Kolarik was tapped to head his firm’s involvement in the Clydesdale breeding farm project.

At a press tour of the newly opened facility in November 2008, Jim Poole, general manager of Clydesdale operations for Anheuser-Busch, gushed about the Clydesdales’ new facility.

“This is a beautiful piece of property that offers privacy for our Clydesdales,” Poole told Stephanie Detillier of the Columbia Missourian. “It’s a nice place for mares to raise their young ones.”

T.J. Greaney of the Columbia Tribune wrote that it had the makings of a five-star equine hotel, and was impressed by its many amenities. “Even the inevitable odor of manure was accounted for,” he wrote. “Louvers at the top of the barn can be opened electronically, releasing hot, smelly air.”

When Kolarik began on the project, however, the preliminary drawings he received from Anheuser-Busch needed a lot of work.

“Their initial designs looked like a big metal shed, an airplane hangar,” he said. “There were a lot of critical flaws in it. In equestrian facilities, you need to have an incredible amount of natural light and ventilation to promote health for the horses. If you don’t have really good ventilation in a barn, it’ll tend to smell horrific; all that ammonia smell in the air poses a health hazard for people working there and the horses as well.”

A design that provided much more ventilation and light was necessary, he said. He was also determined to make the facility’s buildings look more like barns and less like metal sheds.

Kolarik had to take the project back to the “drawing board.” He began by creating two new concept schemes for the facility. After worked with Anheuser-Busch representatives he ended up with a combination of the two schemes.

Then, Kolarik really got busy.

The project, which includes a total of 8 buildings, took place in two phases. Phase I included a series of pasture shelters and a big hay barn. After Kolarik completed the design for Phase I, a construction firm went to work; he was doing the construction documents for those buildings while creating the design for Phase II, the large stable, the facility’s centerpiece. In addition to those tasks, he was also working on other smaller company projects.

“The biggest challenge, by far, was trying to coordinate the design process in the middle of ongoing construction,” he said. “The stable went under construction when I was probably about 50 percent done with Phase I construction documents. At the same time the stable was under construction, we were doing its final interior design.”

All the while, he had to navigate the currents of working with a large corporation.

“We were lucky to be working with just some of the top engineers and representatives of their company, because it was kind of a pet project of the Busch family and we didn’t have as much red tape as you typically would expect from a company like that,” he said. “But it was still a pretty major review process for every single decision, and it got us behind in our design work while construction was ongoing and so just trying to manage keeping ahead of the construction was the primary difficulty we had.”

In addition to his architectural duties, Kolarik served as liaison between two camps at the company, the engineers and the Clydesdale operation, a division within the Anheuser-Busch company. “It really turned out to be a political process more than anything,” said Kolarik of his liaison duties.

“The people controlling the money were the engineers. Very practical, engineering-minded people,” he said, adding that their top priority wasn’t so much carrying on the Clydesdale tradition as much as controlling the project’s budget.

“Controlling spending was critical for them,” he said. “The project was a massive undertaking for the size budget they had,” said Kolarik.

On the other hand, there was the Clydesdale operation.

“The Clydesdale people are very aware of the tradition of the animals and the importance of their health as well as the smooth operation of the farm,” he said. “They understand the concepts about what’s good and healthy for the horses, but the technical aspects of how to achieve a building that promotes that kind of environment is something they’re not savvy about.”

They needed an advocate, he said, to help the engineers understand the importance of dormers and clerestory vents and cupolas, and that they’re not simply there for show, but for critical ventilation needs.

“The Clydesdale operations people were really great to work with, but they were not very excited about all the long design meetings. Sometimes, it was really difficult to get them to come to corporate headquarters, sit at a conference table for 10 hours and hash out design details.”

He said the finished product is not meant to be a show facility where people walk through and take tours of, but rather a commercial, state-of-the-art breeding facility.

“We had to have the ability to move the horses independently of each other,” he said. “We had to maintain separate areas for the stallions, the mares, and the mares with foals, and create a way in the building for horses and people to flow through without causing social problems among the residents. All of those things are critical considerations.”

Equestrian facilities, said Kolarik, need the right products so horses aren’t chewing things, bumping or running into things, or getting cut on things that protrude.

“That’s one of the things that our company offers our clients, is the ability to help them choose and select the right products that will function at a commercial, industrial level of quality while maintaining incredibly high safety standards,” said Kolarik. “All of those things might be small details, but they make a huge difference in the daily operation of the facility.”

After graduating with his master’s degree from the College of Architecture in 2004, Kolarik had a job offer from a firm in Florida that specialized in airports, but the opportunity fell through about a week before he was supposed to begin.

He and his wife moved to southern Kansas, where his family has a farm. Kolarik began looking for work and was hired at gh2.

“I really just fell into equestrian architecture, but I was interested in it because I already had an agricultural background,” he said.

Kolarik has been part of the gh2 Gralla Equestrian Architects team for a major equestrian event venue in Cairo, an equestrian club in Abu Dhabi, and an equine center in the West Indies.

He’s also designed many an equestrian center in the U.S.

At the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington, he served as project architect, developing a master plan, floor plans, and overall aesthetics for two barn designs that encompass 800 indoor stalls and a template for the replacement of the park’s existing stall buildings. The park is scheduled to host the 2010 World Equestrian Games, the Olympics of the equestrian world, which features world championships for eight equestrian sports.

He also developed master plans for new equestrian facilities at New Mexico State University, Oklahoma City’s State Fair Park, and many other farms and ranches.

 

Kolarik’s current major project is taking him all the way to the Eastern hemisphere; he’s designing the conversion of a Soviet-era chicken farm into a polo club outside Moscow for a partnership of the office of the president of Russia and a private developer.

“What we’ve done is come in and select several of the most historic old structures to keep, remove other structures that are metal buildings, and develop a high-end polo complex,” he said.

The chicken farm was begun in the 1930s with structures made of heavy brick masonry. Over the years, he said, more barns and structures were added to the facility. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the farm continued as a cooperative, but Kolarik said it slowly went out of business.

“The task is to develop the equestrian aspects of the project working in conjunction with another firm the clients have hired that specializes in high-end residential developments. The client is looking for a real interesting architectural style, which would be kind of an industrial Modern glass and steel new structure integrated with the historical old structures of the chicken farm. Currently, we’re still in the planning and development stage,” he said.

The concept is similar to that of an American-style suburban golf course, where a country club and golf course is surrounded by high-end homes.

“What’s funny is this is surprisingly similar to my thesis project I did at Texas A&M,” he said. “I took a burned-out old American Legion building in Overton, kept the old red-brick masonry walls of that structure and developed a new glass and steel and wood structure that grew up out of the center of that. So it’s kind of déjà vu, but on a much larger scale.”

His thesis director, Bob Warden, a professor of architecture and director of the College of Architecture’s Center for Heritage Conservation, was one of Kolarik’s inspirations during his college days.

“I enjoyed my work with Bob,” said Kolarik. “I really gained a lot of insight from his theories of preservation and of life in general. He’s probably been the biggest influence on what I’m doing today.”

He also mentioned the late Alan Stacell as one of his biggest influences. For 40 years, Stacell was an institution at the college, serving as teacher, mentor and friend to young Aggie designers.



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