Buhl Police Department, Buhl ID · Municipal Police Station

A bank building that had been empty for years became the City of Buhl's police station. Adaptive reuse suited this one particularly well, because a bank arrives with a secure structure, a public lobby built for people walking in off the street, and a vault, and each of those maps onto something a police department needs. The conversion had to serve two kinds of use at once: a public face, with a lobby and records office where residents come in, and secure police functions behind it, including private offices, a conference room, a dedicated interrogation room, and open-office workspace. Adapting a building designed around a bank's needs to a police department's meant working within the existing structure and infrastructure rather than around them, and existing features were reused and integrated wherever they could serve the new use rather than being demolished and rebuilt. Budget shaped the work throughout. This was a municipal project with a tight construction budget, and value-engineering decisions were coordinated directly with the contractor to control cost without giving up what the department needed day to day. The result puts a long-vacant downtown building back into civic use and gives the department a facility suited to how it actually operates.