Building Technology  

Shingle Style Reboot

PHOTOGRAPHY: © SOM/Dave Burk; Lucas Blair Simpson

The SCC sits among a hodgepodge of architecture styes.

PHOTOGRAPHY: © SOM/Dave Burk; Lucas Blair Simpson

 

With an innovative double-skin facade, SOM signals MIT’s commitment to the future of computing

Artificial intelligence continues to advance at a rapid pace, leading to calls to ensure that its capabilities and influence do not grow unchecked. In 2018, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology established the Ste­phen A. Schwarzman College of Computing (SCC) as part of a

$1 billion commitment to address the “opportunities and challenges presented by the prevalence of computing and the rise of artificial intelligence.”

This investment included creating a home for the SCC. The project’s brief called for a “signature” building to house laboratories, classrooms, and offices on the northwest side of Vassar Street, then considered somewhat of a back side to the Cambridge campus. Surrounding its site was the sculptural, white limestone–clad Brain and Cognitive Sciences Building by the late Charles Correa with Goody Clancy; the expressive metal and brick volumes of the Ray and Maria Stata Center by Frank Gehry; and a collection of nondescript 1960s and ’70s concrete and masonry structures. To its rear were an active rail line and parking lots.

To counter the hodgepodge of architectural styles while celebrating the college’s mission to advance technology in a responsible, transparent way, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill successfully proposed a rectilinear building with twin wings with textured facades of large-format glass shingles. Canted in both plan and section, each glazed unit was intended to look “suspended in air, disconnected from the last one,” says SOM partner Colin Koop. “You’re not even sure if it’s a fully enclosed building.”

Furthering the illusion, the shingles run past the building’s edges at its roofline and sides, creating a “great, transparent sail” that Koop says enhances the structure’s relatively modest stature—178,000 square feet over eight floors—and symbolizes the SCC’s “outsized importance to the future of the Institute.”

But, by designing a south-facing elevation with a 67 percent window-to-wall ratio, the team knew they had to deliver on energy performance in “legitimate . . . scientific and measurable ways,” says SOM technical design partner Carrie Moore.

Common Ground

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JASON O’REAR

 

Studio Gang creates an interconnected campus for the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

For 24 years, the California College of the Arts’ 33 academic programs were spread across two campuses: the verdant, Victorian-era former James Treadwell estate in Oakland and a converted Grey­­hound-bus maintenance shed in San Francisco’s emergent Design District. Two art-learning cultures took shape as different as the sites. In Oakland, faculty and students channeled the school’s Arts & Crafts DNA in buildings, some over a century old, learning and making indoors and out. In San Francisco, the feel is more factorylike, an open plan of studios and classrooms bordering a giant central “makers yard” in the high-vaulted shell of a vintage 1951 SOM Modernist industrial design.

When Studio Gang won a 2016 competition to merge the campuses with a single expansion adjacent to the bus shed, its research with faculty, students, and board members yielded many hopes for bringing the two worlds together, all with lightest possible touch on the environment. But the parti, says founding partner Jeanne Gang, emerged from the staff members who are so often an art school’s backbone: the shop managers. “They’re not just managers,” says Gang. “They’re the ones who help students make things. There’s a whole shop culture.”

Gang describes the addition, which opened in October, “as basically just a big makerspace with a garden on top.” Calling it “Double Ground,” Studio Gang’s team has crafted an elegantly minimalist synthesis of the two campus environments, the college’s ambitious sustainability goals, and (it being San Fran­cisco) seismic resiliency.

The first floor’s 57,000-square-foot concrete-enclosed expanse unfolds in a veritable agora of high- and low-tech labs and shops for furniture-making, CNC fabrication, spray-painting, chemical mold-making, ceramics, screen printing, lithography, digital fabrication, sandblasting, and one known simply as “Ham­mer Room,” for metalsmithing jewelry. Two glass-shrouded, open-air “maker yards” provide outdoor space, to build and display work, while welcoming daylight deep into the interior.

Groundbreaking

Photography by Halkin Mason

The 38,000-square-foot TIGER is a long, low, metal-clad structure.

Princeton University digs deep into bedrock to lead the charge in geo-exchange technology on campuses

Princeton University’s Myslik Field looks like many soccer stadiums, but beneath its manicured turf lie dozens of bore holes filled by plastic tubes that harvest the consistent temperature of the earth (around 56 de­grees Fahrenheit) to heat and cool dozens of buildings on the sprawling campus. A parking structure south of the field similarly hosts many more bore holes which feed—and are fed by—heat pump technology housed in a long, low, gray-metal-clad structure elaborately named the Ther­mally Integrated Geo-Exchange Resource, which cutely forms an acronym of the university’s mascot: TIGER.

Geo-exchange, which entails drawing warmth from the earth to heat buildings as well as injecting heat into the earth for cooling, could be regarded as the misunderstood renewable, since its great promise has largely been ignored in debates that skip from solar and wind to yet-to-be-mainstreamed generation technologies such as fusion and hydrogen, not to men­tion high-cost nuclear. At Prince­ton, and increasingly in building complexes of other intensive energy users (record, November 2023), the technology’s true potential is being realized. In Prince­­ton’s case it is expected to account for almost 40 percent of the university’s operational carbon reduction by 2046 (its 300th anniver­sary), the year it plans to achieve carbon-neutral status. (Effective systems can be installed in structures as small as houses, however.)

Geo-exchange may be an unfamiliar term, but it is succeeding the more familiar geothermal, which nowadays describes the nascent, extremely deep-bore technology that aspires to tap heat exceeding 160 degrees Fahrenheit from depths of 1,600 feet or more for use in power generation and industrial processes.

Some 1,700 bore holes from 600 to 850 feet deep have been drilled on campus so far, cut through bedrock for considerable lengths. That is expensive, but the rock, and the groundwater it captures, are each highly conductive, and therefore efficient in their role as a winter heat source and a summer heat sink. The TIGER building, and the smaller Central Utility Building (yes, shortened to CUB), both designed by the Washington, D.C., office of ZGF, make the “exchange” element of the system visible by intention. “The architectural idea is simple, humble, not precious,” explains ZGF partner Toby Hasselgren. Yet the two structures hold their own architecturally and draw curiosity about what’s inside.

Faithful Facelift

PHOTOGRAPHY: © Historic New England, Steve Rosenthal

Collection of Commissioned Work

Gund Hall, the home of Harvard’s GSD, gets a new and improved skin, true to the original design intent.

The conservation of Modernist buildings from the middle of the last century pre­sents a special set of challenges. Many were constructed with experimental materials and systems that are now failing and no longer available or have fallen out of favor. They were built in an age of inexpensive energy and global-warming naivete, often requiring huge quantities of natural resources to heat and cool. How can such buildings be preserved in a way that enhances their performance and sustainability while maintaining their essential character? Gund Hall, home of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), on the university’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus, provides an example. The late-modernist structure, designed by Australian architect John Andrews (a GSD alumnus) and completed in 1972, is a composition in exposed poured-in-place concrete and steel. At its core is a dramatic open volume housing four terraced studio “trays” sheltered below a stepped roof supported on a series of 125-foot-long sloping tubular trusses. Remaining program elements, including an auditorium, library, faculty offices, and classrooms, are tucked below the trays or partially wrap them. Glass—as one would expect with a building designed before the 1973 oil embargo—is an essential feature, especially for the studio expanse, which has east-facing clerestory windows incorporated into the cascading roof, and gridded glazed facades on the north and south. Sarah M. Whiting, GSD dean, describes Gund as “a unique building that was at once solid and transparent and that prioritized the student body, united within an enormous, light-filled, single space.”

Room and Board

Photography by Alan Karchmer

A southern wall was lowered to introduce more daylight into the inner courtyard.

VMDO Architects overhauls a century-old dormitory, readying it for the next hundred years

For students at The George Washington University (GW), living in Thurston Hall was a formative experience—described by some as having a feeling of solidarity earned through mutual hardship. For, while the nine-story brick dormitory had long cast a monumental presence on F Street in Washing­ton, D.C., “the building set up a promise that it didn’t deliver in the inside,” says Joe Atkins, principal at VMDO Architects of Char­lottes­ville, Virginia, which completed a transformative renovation of the building in 2022.

Indeed, by almost any standard, the interiors were dismal. Nearly 1,100 freshmen were shoehorned into suites designed for four people but housing as many as six. Cramped, windowless corridors encircling the building were a wayfinding challenge. And the central lightwell—the only view available to half the residents—was dark, dank, and inaccessible.

Given those conditions, demolition might have been an option. But “we were not able to tear Thurston down,” says Adam Aaronson, assistant vice president for construction management and campus planning at GW. “It is located within GW’s Historic District and therefore needed to remain.”

Instead, the university moved forward with a gut renovation of the building, staging an invited competition that VMDO won. The firm’s inspired central idea was to carve away portions of five floors on the building’s south side, vastly increasing sunlight penetration into the lightwell. In addition, they reimagined the dreary lightwell as a dynamic urban living room—a center of social activity with a landscaped plaza, raised patio, and seventh-floor terrace that invites students to mingle.