Marion Fire Station design brings national award to Cedar Rapids firm

The forward-looking design of the main Marion Fire Station, opened in 2021, has won a national award for OPN Architects.

OPN, with offices in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin, was awarded a 2024 Architecture Honor Award by the American Institute of Architects.

The award celebrates the best contemporary architecture regardless of budget, size, style or type.

Marion's Fire Station No. 1 opened in August 2021 at 100 Irish Dr. The 21,000-square-foot building's final construction costs were around $9 million. Its design has received eight other national and international awards.

David Sorg, a principal at OPN and lead designer for the fire station, said the city of Marion hired OPN in 2018 after city officials saw a fire station the firm designed in Madison, Wis., which received the national AIA Justice Award in 2020.

Sorg said the Marion fire chief at the time, Deb Krebill, told OPN she wanted the new station to be “the national benchmark for how biophilic design can reduce PTSD among firefighters.”

Biophilic designs focus on integrating natural elements, such as light, vegetation and natural materials, into buildings to enhance human well-being and connectivity to nature.

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“If you create design elements that reduce stress and increase cognitive performance, all these things help align your wake-sleep cycles, and you can see how that correlates with firefighters being at their best and saving more lives,” Sorg said.

The fire station includes such features as two ipe wood terraces, a green roof visible from the firefighter living spaces and sleeping rooms and full-height glass apparatus bay doors on the north and south to maximize daylight.

The station has circadian rhythm-based lighting that synchronizes firefighters' sleep-wake cycle and escalating alarms that reduce the physiological and psychological stress upon being awakened.

The station is divided into zones based on the risk of contaminant exposure to protect firefighters from carcinogens found in soot after returning from fires.

Red zones house equipment exposed to these carcinogens. Yellow zones contain decontamination facilities, including individual shower spaces. And green zones designated for living spaces and neutral areas.

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Marion Fire Chief Tom Fagan, who joined the department in 2022, said the station is a stark contrast with the “bleak” fire stations he’s seen across the United States.

“If you were to look at older fire stations, a lot of them are cinder block concrete buildings that are very dark and have very few windows,” Fagan said. “We want our people to enjoy their work, and part of that has to do with how our workplace environment is constructed.”

Fagan said the high suicide rates among first responders played a part in designing the building.

“We absolutely want to change the statistic,” Fagan said. “We want to have a working environment where people can have a career and be a first responder and be able to leave that career at some point in the future, just as healthy as they were when they started.”

O​​PN is now one of just three Iowa-based firms to win the AIA Architecture Honor Award since the award's inception in 1949. The Marion fire station design is only the second fire station to win the award.

OPN was one of 13 architecture firms to receive the 2024 Architecture Honor Awards during an awards ceremony in Washington, D.C. Other projects recognized for the award include the SoFi Stadium and Hollywood Park in Los Angeles and the John A. Paulson Center in New York City.

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Landon Burg, a senior project architect at OPN, said it was surreal to be recognized with an award at a national ceremony.

“It’s really amazing to see that this project stands shoulder to shoulder with some of the biggest, most exciting projects in the world,” he said.

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