Turnpike Service Plazas

The Turnpike Service Plazas was a competition won by Zyscovich to build two new plaza prototypes and retrofit two other existing plazas.  The overall project was inspired by a tropical modern palette and reinterpreted vernacular components such as the porch. The West Palm Beach Service Plaza, for example, was a retrofit project of an existing aging service plaza, which included a new façade composed of a larger entryway mass and a pergola faced with prefabricated undulating louvers, used to protect the outdoor sitting area from the intense Florida sun. In the Pompano Beach Service plaza, the large floating concrete roof moves visitors in and out of the building while the louvered front porch creates a space for pause. The larger Fort Pierce and Fort Drum prototypes, also deploy much of the same strategies, while creating different indoor and outdoor dining experiences: one can dine under the large skylight in the main hall or outdoor, sheltered from the sun by the large floating roof and a tall screened wall. Overall, the projects aims at re-imagining the rest stop experience, so that visitors are actually willing to pause and enjoy the brightly lit spaces of the new plazas, rather than running in and out as they typically did.