Minidoka Visitor Center Receives Orchid Award

Since 1977, Preservation Idaho has hosted the annual Orchids & Onions Awards, a ceremony designed to celebrate those individuals and organizations that have made a positive contribution to historic preservation, and in turn, to bring awareness to those projects which have shown an insensitivity to historic preservation.

Friends of Minidoka successfully nominated the National Park Service for a 2020 Orchid Award for Excellence in Historic Preservation for the adaptive reuse of Warehouse #5 into the new visitor center at Minidoka National Historic Site. This is Minidoka's third Orchid Award, following a 2012 award for the honor roll reconstruction and 2016 award for the guard tower reconstruction.

Preservation Idaho notes that this project maintained the historic integrity of a 75-year-old dilapidated warehouse and rehabilitated it to serve as a world-class visitor center that will continue to stand and honor the history of Japanese Americans. Built in the early 1940s, Warehouse #5 served as the motor repair and tire shop in the then Minidoka War Relocation Center. The process of rehabilitation and adaptive reuse of the historic warehouse into a visitor center began in 2017. Historic parts of the building have been differentiated from the new with an external treatment with durbigum roofing materials and wood lathes to resemble the WWII-era appearance. The industrial character and historic setting of the warehouse have been maintained, as well as many other architectural details.

Warehouse #5 | National Archives & Records Administration, 210-CMB-V2-1907