Photo © Robert Benson
ECoRE, The Pennsylvania State University.
This special series examines programmatically flexible facilities for STEM-related fields on college and university campuses. Each project highlights pragmatic design and the latest in energy-efficient building technologies and systems.
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Lab Grown
Patkau Architects delivers a high-performing biomedical building that prioritizes collaboration.
By Katharine Logan
Biomedical engineering depends on cross-pollination—between medicine and engineering, research and application, academia and industry. As Canada’s first purpose-built school for this integrative discipline, the Gordon B. Shrum Building at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver creates an environment that is collaborative, adaptable, and humane while setting new standards for sustainability and accessibility in a laboratory building. Designed by Patkau Architects, with Architecture49 (A49) as laboratory architect, the building opened this spring at a construction cost of just $527 per square foot—remarkably economical for its type.
The school’s director, Peter Zandstra, “was insistent that the building focus wherever possible on creating spaces that support collaboration,” says Greg Boothroyd, a principal at Vancouver-based Patkau Architects. “We had to work very leanly and really focus on large-scale moves that would achieve his objectives.”
With a site fronting to the north on University Boulevard, a major campus thoroughfare, and to the south on a courtyard at the heart of the health-sciences precinct—the lines of each skewing at different angles—the building negotiates contrasting urban conditions and physical geometries. An early decision to preserve a row of mature London plane trees along the courtyard’s edge became a principal organizing metric, Boothroyd says, “and the idea of connecting back to this courtyard, to the trees, to daylight and nature became a theme for the building.” The decision shaped the building’s footprint, form, and character.
Within an envelope of white brick and metal—tying into UBC’s campus palette, chosen to help brighten the city’s gray winters—the building consists of five stories, with an additional, below-grade level that compensates for the tight, tree-preserving footprint. Pragmatically stacked laboratories line the north elevation, parallel to the street, where floor-to-ceiling glass provides diffuse northern light. Offices line the south elevation, parallel to the trees, with leaf-filtered light and courtyard views. Connecting these zones and resolving their differing geometries are two multi-level atria that define lower and upper common spaces.
The lower common space extends between boulevard and courtyard, inviting the wider campus community through, and opens vertically between main and below-grade floors. These levels are where classrooms, makerspaces, and lecture theaters are located. (In an innovative, cost-free move, even the lecture theaters are configured to foster collaboration: in one, double rows on each tier allow students to turn to face each other across a shared worktop; in another, tiers of tables for six sit at 90 degrees to the presentation.) Daylight from the main floor’s courtyard window wall fills both levels of the atrium, and a wide stairway through the opening ties them together.
The upper common space spans four floors, forming the social heart of the research levels, and the separation of office and lab zones brings people into the places between. Bridges from one side to the other humanize the atrium’s scale, while tables and seating along the solid balustrades support informal meetings and chance encounters. Glass partitions allow for borrowed daylight and visual connections between spaces as well as recurring views of the courtyard foliage. Click here to continue...
Higher Ground
KieranTimberlake’s partially buried Scaife Hall revitalizes a neglected corner of Carnegie Mellon’s campus
By leopoldo villardi
“A cornerstone site for an engineering building? That’s unusual on a campus nowadays,” says architect Stephen Kieran of Scaife Hall, the first project by his firm, KieranTimberlake, at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). The building, situated on the steep slopes of Pittsburgh’s Junction Hollow ravine, is the new home of the school’s mechanical engineering department and acts as a campus gateway at its southwest edge.
Photo © Sahar Coston-Hardy / ESTO
The cornerstone site abuts Baker-Porter and Hamerschlag halls.
“We wanted to restore lost vitality. Over time, that part of campus had become back-of-house instead of front-of-house,” he adds. But building on such a prominent site also meant contending with CMU’s architectural heritage, including significant neighbors by fin de siècle architect Henry Hornbostel. Many structures at the university bear his signature brawny industrial classicism, which served as a potent analogy for the school’s focus on nurturing both the arts and the sciences. To the north, with its arched smokestack, is Hamerschlag Hall; to the east is the 1,000-foot-long Baker-Porter Hall, known for its linear hallway and daring stair of Guastavino tiles. (Notably, Hornbostel was the architect of the Queensborough and Hell Gate bridges in New York.)
Scaife Hall replaces an earlier structure of the same name, designed by Altenhof & Brown and completed in 1962, which featured an attached sculptural auditorium wittily dubbed the “potato chip” for its saddle-shaped roof. “It was really tight, with crammed rooms that weren’t feasible to renovate,” says KieranTimberlake principal Brendan Miller.
The replacement is 85,000 square feet—double the area of the original—and includes a diverse program organized into three distinct volumes. “Mechanical engineering today is not the discipline that you and I learned about while in architecture school,” says Kieran. The field, he explains, now encompasses robotics (and organic “soft-botics”), biomechanics, wearable technology, machine learning, and much more—meaning spaces needed to accommodate a broad range of research and uses.
A two-story brick-clad volume, running parallel to the hill into which it is nestled and accounting for about half of Scaife’s total square footage, houses an open-plan area for doctoral researchers and their workstations and a double-height drone arena, as well as wet and dry laboratories, pressurized relative to neighboring spaces to prevent contamination. “Windows introduce daylight to the desk spaces, and then we buried the labs deep into the hillside,” Kieran explains. “That keeps them very stable in terms of temperature.” Above this plinth, a two-story bar, accommodating seminar rooms and offices, continues the visual patter of Baker-Porter’s lengthy elevation along Frew Street. This bar also hovers above the ground plane, allowing emergency-vehicle access beneath it and creating sight lines into campus from the street. Last, a four-story cubic tower, with the hall’s auditorium and faculty offices, stands sentry at the campus’s southwest corner. Kieran likens it to an acropolis, for the sciences.
The configuration, says Miller, also forms a hardscaped quad (with great views of the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning) between Scaife and neighboring Hamerschlag, Roberts, ANSYS, and Baker-Porter halls—which together comprise the nucleus of engineering facilities. The quad is programmed with a café, housed in Scaife. “Students spend a lot of time here, and having that amenity allows them to really make it their own,” says Miller. Click here to continue...
Core Work
Payette’s engineering facility at Penn State strengthens interdisciplinary research.
By Matthew Marani
Nationwide, students are enrolling in STEM-related higher-education programs in greater numbers than previously. At Penn State University, over 50 percent of the student body is matriculating through such courses of study. To accommodate this swelling population, Penn State, like other schools, is outlaying vast capital to build state-of-the-art facilities that will house laboratories and classrooms. The Engineering Collaborative Research and Education Building (ECoRE), designed by Boston-based Payette, is the latest addition to the campus. The project’s inventive and flexible layout is intended to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration, all while reducing the gargantuan energy load typical of this typology through its well-tuned building systems.
Payette’s relationship with Penn State goes back to 2018, when the university commissioned the firm to develop a two-phase master plan for the College of Engineering, within the southwest corner of the campus. In 2019, the school bid out phase one of the master plan, two of four buildings proposed by Payette. The firm joined the competition and was ultimately commissioned for both edifices—the Engineering Design and Innovation Building, located across a newly landscaped quad and completed in 2023, and ECoRE, which opened its doors fall 2024.
STEM-related projects comprise an overwhelming share of Payette’s body of work, and the firm draws on that expertise to maximize the lifespans of what are disproportionately large capital investments. “Many schools are now grappling with lab facilities built half a century ago, and the bones of these buildings are constrained and unable to support generational adaptability,” Payette principal Jeffrey DeGregorio explains. “Those with open spaces and higher floor-to-floor heights, which can be updated with the latest technologies, are more likely to stand the test of time.”
The 283,000-square-foot project is now the main hub for the College of Engineering, which counts some 11,000 students and 3,000 faculty. Five stories tall, with an L-shaped footprint, it is made up of a superstructure of steel framing and composite slabs (25 percent of the floor plates are poured-
in-place concrete). The bulk of the building, with its labs, classrooms, and offices, is clad in reddish-brown brick, while its campus-facing bar is enveloped in glass and copper-anodized aluminum panels and fins.
The latter portion, oriented to the southeast, is called the Vertical Campus Commons, and it is the primary entrance and gathering space as well as means of circulation. Within, it contains a five-story atrium that reaches down to the basement level, ringed by daylit study and meeting areas. At the atrium’s center, a two-story volume enveloped in white oak panels hovers conspicuously—it is suspended by six hollow structural sections from two steel box girders at the roof level—to house a set of flexible classrooms. Its base, on the second floor, comprises a coffered ceiling formed of orthogonal ribs and triangular panels, with linear light fixtures.
Fifty research bays are placed throughout the building. Low vibration in the basement makes it suitable for specialty labs such as wind tunnels, anechoic chambers, structural research, flight simulation, and, notably, a 27,000-cubic-foot facility for testing the ability of rotorcraft to deal with ice. Above grade, there are typically 10 labs per floor, each with 15-foot ceilings, forming the spine of ECoRE. While spaces are grouped thematically to support different programs, they are designed to promote interdepartmental use. Click here to continue...
Reset the Bar
Ross Barney Architects’ Foglia Center brings thoughtful design to industrial spaces.
By James Gauer
As the cost of four-year degrees at colleges and universities grows ever less affordable, two-year programs at community colleges are becoming an increasingly attractive option for higher education. But the campuses of these institutions have generally not been places of great architectural distinction. That is changing. If you want proof, look at McHenry County College (MCC) in Crystal Lake, Illinois, 45 miles northwest of Chicago, where Ross Barney Architects (RBA) has recently completed the Foglia Center for Advanced Technology and Innovation (CATI), a sophisticated hub for research, technology, and creative collaboration.
MCC, established in 1967, focuses on workforce training. “This isn’t an Ivy League institution,” says RBA design principal and founder Carol Ross Barney, recipient of the 2023 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal. “It’s just a small community college in rural Illinois, trying to prepare students for both traditional and emerging technologies and trades.” MCC has forged strategic relationships with local manufacturers who need employees with such training, and CATI was designed to meet this demand, putting its graduates on a path to good jobs.
The new 48,000-square-foot facility is named after local manufacturers and philanthropists Vince and Pat Foglia. Located at the southeastern edge of MCC’s campus, it’s flanked by an access road and parking lots. It was not a promising site, but Ross Barney and her team made it work by integrating their project cohesively with existing buildings. They inserted a bar—an elongated rectangular volume—parallel to an adjacent bar of automotive shops to the west. The void between them functions as a service drive. To the east is a landscaped stormwater-infiltration basin.
Several additive elements punctuate the straightforward rectilinear massing: a long shed-roofed clerestory rises above a flat roof; two mechanical wells project out and up from the west facade; and the lower level of the south wall extends to enclose an outdoor lab. At the north end is the main entrance, a sculptural collage that includes a generous canopy, a long ramp, and two stairs, one of which leads down to a lower-level entry.
Bar buildings may appear simple in site-planning diagrams, but there’s a lot going on inside this one to accommodate a varied program. “I’m a plan freak,” says Ross Barney, “and this plan is informed by the allocation of resources.” A circulation spine below the clerestory divides the volume asymmetrically along its length and offers open areas for informal collaboration, relaxing, socializing, and studying.
To the east are two floors of classrooms and labs for engineering technology, artificial intelligence (AI), industrial maintenance, manufacturing, and computer numerical control (CNC) milling, along with administration, service spaces, and a metal-fabrication shop. A makerspace, showcasing robotics and 3D printing, is located near the entry and open to the public. In tandem with an adjacent conference room, it serves as an incubator for students, faculty, and outside manufacturing partners to meet, share ideas, and develop prototypes.
To the west are three double-height labs for welding, HVAC, and more CNC milling, plus a stair with tiered seating that serves as an occasional lecture hall and event space. On the second floor, the circulation spine pulls back from the labs, allowing daylight from the clerestory to reach the floor below, while also forming catwalks protected by gridded steel railings. These provide opportunities to observe activity in the labs, whose enclosures incorporate plentiful glass, putting their impressive inner workings on display and offering an astonishing degree of transparency. Click here to continue...
