UNL students showcase ideas to bring new life to Lincoln’s Old City Hall

LINCOLN, Neb. (KLKN) – The City of Lincoln is looking to renovate the Old City Hall building near 10th and O streets.

On Friday, teams of students in architecture, interior design and landscape architecture showed off their “reimagined” visions of the building as a retail space, according to a University of Nebraska-Lincoln press release.

The initiative, the Downtown Corridors Project, is intended to make O, Ninth and 10th streets the best first impression of the city.

City planners Collin Christopher and Stephanie Rouse and local preservationist Dan Worth have been collaborating with assistant professor Sonya Turkman’s studio this semester to explore revitalization options for the historic building.

“Old City Hall is a beautiful building with lots of history,” Christopher said in the press release. “But to a large extent, it’s an underused space. When we think about the larger downtown environment, one of the goals of this project is to think about how this underutilized area can be given new life and how we could use both the building and the block itself to stimulate local retail.”

Students displayed their designs on the first floor of the Old City Hall. One team’s vision had a health-based focus, including a pharmacy and green spaces.

“For our concept idea, my team is imagining the space as a health retail center,” interior design major Courtney Goff said in the release. “We’re calling it the Health Hub, and inside we’re having a grocery store, pharmacy, a salad and juice bar, some workout studios that integrate nature by including an interior courtyard and an exterior healing garden.”

The open house was an opportunity for students to gain experience in their desired fields, but also an opportunity for city officials to be offered ideas that only students would think of, including add-ons to existing buildings.

“There’s a level of pragmatism that exists when you work in city government,” Christopher said. “And these students don’t have those same boundaries and are allowed to really explore ideas that we wouldn’t otherwise be thinking about.”