Mini Mart City Park / GO’C

Architects: GO’C
Area: 1,500 ft² building and 3,000 ft² park
Year: 2023
Photography: Kevin Scott
Contractor: Métis Construction
Structural and Civil Engineer: J Welch Engineering
Environmental Consultant: G-Logics
Kinetic Window Fabrication: Chris McMullen
Lighting Designer: Fixture Studio
Artists and Founders: SuttonBeresCuller
Architecture Team: Gentry / O’Carroll (Jon Gentry AIA, Aimée O’Carroll ARB), Ben Kruse, Becca Fuhrman, Nick Durig
City: Seattle, Washington
Country: USA

Mini Mart City Park community and cultural center, designed by GO’C in collaboration with SuttonBeresCuller in Seattle, has converted a former gas station into a multifunctional civic site that supports public art, environmental education, and social gathering. The project replaces the compromised 1930s structure with a 1,500 square foot building and a 3,000 square foot green park, organized around a courtyard and rooftop level equipped with solar panels and drought-resistant planting. A clear separation between gallery and utility spaces optimizes site use while historic gas station elements are reinterpreted architecturally. An on-site remediation system, integrated with educational components, addresses the legacy of pollution, offering a replicable model for reactivating contaminated urban plots through architecture and collaborative art practice.

Design is a dialogue—shaped by site exploration, refined through discussions with our clients, and enriched by the expertise of our collaborators and craftspeople.

Interview with Jon Gentry and Aimée O’Carroll of GO’C

Mini Mart City Park is a hybrid cultural and environmental reuse project located in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood. Commissioned by the client Mini Mart City Park and designed by GO’C for the artist collective SuttonBeresCuller, the site transforms a long-vacant gas station lot into a neighborhood anchor for community engagement and art-centered events. The project responds to both spatial and ecological challenges, aiming to reframe underutilized brownfield infrastructure as active public space.

The original 1930s-era 450 square foot filling station was analyzed for adaptive reuse, but it was determined to be structurally compromised and insufficient in size. GO’C proposed a new program consisting of a 1,500 square foot building and a 3,000 square foot park. This expanded footprint allowed for increased functional capacity and greater integration of the public landscape.

The layout divides the program into two primary components. A gallery and community space faces the street, while a storage and utility zone is placed at the back. Between them, an open-air courtyard creates spatial continuity between the interior and exterior zones. This central space supports outdoor exhibitions, film nights, and access for event setup, extending the building’s functionality into the landscape.

Above, a rooftop platform adds 1,000 square feet of usable exterior space for small gatherings. The roof integrates solar panels and a green layer planted with sedum and drought-tolerant grasses, contributing to environmental performance and climate resilience.

The design introduces flexible architectural elements that enable the compact gallery to function efficiently. A pivoting window measuring six feet six inches by eight feet, fabricated by artist Chris McMullen, opens the gallery to the adjacent park and doubles as a service window during public events. Daylight enters the space through a fifteen-foot-long skylight, diffused by exposed wood rafters. A compact kitchen, integrated into the rear cabinetry, opens directly to the courtyard through sliding and hinged glass doors. The operability of three exterior walls allows the gallery to expand visually and physically into the surrounding park.

Visual references to early 20th-century service stations inform the material and formal vocabulary of the building. Painted clapboard siding, metal-framed divided-light windows, hand-lettered signage, and a broad canopy roof recall historical typologies. These gestures serve as contextual memory, reimagined for contemporary civic use. As the architects state, this is “a new type of filling station, one dedicated to serving art, community, and civic engagement.”

The project also addresses the environmental legacy of its site. Beneath the surface, a remediation system designed in collaboration with environmental consultant G-Logics and engineered by J Welch Engineering actively treats soil contamination left from the site’s former use. The system, which includes air sparging and soil vapor extraction, is partially visible within the building’s utility room and functions as an educational element for visitors.

With more than 700 abandoned gas stations across the Puget Sound region and over 200,000 nationally, Mini Mart City Park provides a working example of how small, polluted parcels can be transformed into shared community resources. Through a coordinated strategy of architecture, environmental engineering, and public art, the project demonstrates a regenerative approach to land use and civic participation.