The McCoy Federal Building is a 1970s concrete office tower in downtown Jackson, Mississippi. After the Oklahoma City bombing, the General Services Administration moved to relocate security screening out of federal buildings and into separate pavilions at their base — sacrificial structures meant to absorb a blast before it reaches the primary building. The McCoy pavilion is one of those. The project asked us to take that brief and make it civic: a building that announces what it is without being defensive about it, and that gives the tower a new public face on the street.
The plan geometry took its cues from the Mississippi River meander patterns documented in Harold Fisk’s 1944 maps for the Army Corps of Engineers — the looping, oxbowed traces of where the river has been. The pavilion’s sinuous footprint is a small piece of that landscape logic translated to a downtown corner. The skin is a system of 19″ × 50″ glass shingles hung from aluminum rails on a ribbon-and-quill structure that lets the shingles flow around the curving plan while staying a standard size — a piece of constructional discipline we developed with Dewhurst MacFarlane on the engineering and Zahner on the fabrication, working in close 3D coordination because the tolerances left no room to figure it out in the field. The aluminum rails grow incrementally longer as they rise, so the skin bristles slightly toward the top: a quiet acknowledgment of the building’s defensive role beneath the welcoming surface.
Inside, the pavilion opens to a skylit lobby that carries the spiral of the plan upward. The geometry that reads as a soft curve from the street resolves overhead into faceted white planes and a large skylight that pulls daylight down through the screening floor. The translucent glass holds the city as a soft reflection in daylight and lets the lobby read as a lantern from the street at dusk.
Fabrication · A. Zahner Company
