Colleges & Universities  

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COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES

College and university buildings aren’t a single typology. The projects on the following pages range from art studios in a revamped industrial structure to transparent labs that showcase the work going on inside. Collectively, they demonstrate ingenious solutions for challenging sites, for adaptive reuse, and for creating buildings that foster collaboration and community. Reading the section and taking the online quiz qualifies for one hour of continuing education credit (see page 116).

Stavros Niarchos Foundation-David Rockefeller River Campus at The Rockefeller University | New York | Rafael Viñoly Architects

The High Road

A research institution ingeniously extends its leafy campus over a busy expressway.

By Joann Gonchar, FAIA

“We’ve added 160,000 square feet of new space, and you can’t see any of it, making it one of our best buildings,” jokes Jay Bargmann, senior vice president at Rafael Viñoly Architects (RVA). He is referring to the firm’s expansion of Rockefeller University, the highly regarded biological- and medical-research institution that occupies a verdant campus along the East River on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

The approximately $500 million endeavor, which has a cumbersome formal name—The Stavros Niarchos Foundation-David Rockefeller River Campus at The Rockefeller University—consists primarily of new laboratories. But the project, which totals 220,000 square feet, also includes new administrative offices, a dining commons, a conference center, and renovations to existing laboratories and offices. And as Bargmann’s remark indicates, the expansion is mostly hidden, at least as one approaches from the existing campus, concealed under two acres of inviting roof gardens. The camouflaged structure, which stretches the equivalent of four city blocks along the river, provides a sharp (and ironic) contrast to another of the firm’s recent New York projects—432 Park Avenue—a pencil-thin skyscraper located less than a mile away that, for the moment at least, is the world’s tallest residential tower, at 1,397 feet high.

The institute was able to pull off its disappearing act because it owned air rights over the FDR Drive—a six-lane highway at the river’s edge that once defined the now 16-acre campus’s eastern boundary. The rights were granted by the city in the early 1970s to the university and nearby hospitals, all of them hemmed in and cut off from the water by the often-congested roadway. To take advantage of its virtual real estate, RVA, its consultants, and the construction team devised a solution that depended on sophisticated engineering, off-site fabrication, and hair-raising acrobatics: during the summer of 2016, 19 prefabricated steel-framed modules, each unique and weighing up to 800 tons, were lifted from a river barge out over the roadway onto already placed columns and foundations (see sidebar, page 88).

The resulting long and low structure is of course not entirely invisible. Two curvilinear glass pavilions—one for the dining facilities and the other for the offices—pop up from the gardens that cover two levels of labs below. At the northern end of the extension and at a lower level, a glass-box conference center adjoins a broad lawn. (The roofs of the three protruding elements will eventually themselves be covered with sedum, in part because they are visible from nearby towers.) The arrangement is a continuation of earlier campus planning strategy, says Bargmann. The Rockefeller grounds, which include traditionally classical structures dating from the early 20th century, and midcentury additions by such firms as Harrison Abramovitz, appear as isolated objects surrounded by a Modernist landscape by Dan Kiley that includes leafy malls, courtyards, and water features. While the older buildings appear to be separate, explains Bargmann, many are connected below grade.

RVA’s contribution to the campus is best understood from the shoreline of Roosevelt Island in the East River, opposite the university. From that vantage point one can clearly see the two stories of labs stretching along the FDR on Y-shaped columns, the building’s sleek and subtly arced form accentuated by horizontal brisessoleil that shield the glass curtain wall. The basic outlines of this scheme, including its long and low organization over the highway, were determined in an earlier master-planning phase led by RVA. Although zoning would have permitted a vertical solution, the idea of a tower didn’t have much appeal, says Timothy O’Connor, the university’s executive vice president. Not only are labs in high-rises difficult to rearrange as research needs evolve, he says, they also can hinder collaboration among different teams. “Scientists with workspaces in tall buildings tend to take the elevator to their labs and stay there.”

With the goal of encouraging interaction among researchers, both organized and spontaneous, the new facility has open-plan floors, each about 740 feet long and divided roughly in half by a lounge space for informal meetings, relaxing, or group study. The areas to the north and the south are organized so that specialized equipment requiring enclosed rooms is located along the wall adjacent to the existing campus, and write-up desks, where scientists work at computers, are positioned along window walls facing the water. The zone in the middle of the roughly 90-foot-deep floor plates is devoted to the lab benches. These sit on top of a raised floor, below which runs the extensive infrastructure essential for scientific research, including that for power, data, and gas. The casework and the floor system are designed on a 2-foot by 2-foot grid so that the research spaces are “plug and play” and readily reconfigurable, explains Bargmann.

This layout is smart and functional, but what makes the scheme stand out is the way it takes advantage of the proximity to the river. Floor-to-ceiling glass gives the scientists a view of the water’s constantly changing surface and reflections, and, because the ceiling heights step up from 8 feet at the west to 18 feet near the river, daylight penetrates deep into interior (automated roller blinds activate to prevent direct morning sun from creating visually uncomfortable conditions). Appropriately utilitarian and durable finishes, including rubber flooring and carpet tile, are all light-colored to enhance the airy and open feeling.

The planning of the new outdoor space—which sits at an elevation about 20 feet above the original campus, to accommodate the laboratory floor-to-floor heights and the required clearance above the FDR—also capitalizes on the river. “Placing trees at the edge of the gardens, along the water, seemed wrong,” says Signe Nielsen, principal of MNLA, the project’s landscape architect. Instead, the perimeter of the lab building’s roof is devoted to a balustrade-protected pathway. This approach allows Rockefeller community members and staff of the neighboring hospitals (the campus is not accessible to the public) to enjoy unobstructed views, but it also acknowledges the exposed nature of the new real estate, which has a completely different microclimate from that of the more sheltered, older part of the university grounds, points out Nielsen. The newly planted trees, including Japanese black pines, are pulled away from the roof’s edge, and have small leaves, so theyaren’t prone to toppling over in strong winds. Throughout, there are spots to sit and relax, including an amphitheater sunk below the garden level and benches integrated into the edges of the planting beds.

In creating a low-rise, horizontally oriented laboratory building disguised by landscape, RVA has added new space for cutting-edge research and for scientific collaboration, both indoors and out. And it has ingeniously—and somewhat counterintuitively—managed to integrate its addition into the existing campus while completely, and nearly invisibly, transforming it.

credits

Architect: Rafel Viñoly Architects — Rafael Viñoly, Jay Bargmann, Charles Blomberg, David Hodge, Bassam Komati

Consultants: Thornton Tomasetti (structure); Ocean and Coastal Consultants (marine); Langan (geotechnical, civil); BR+A Consulting Engineers (m/e/p/fp); AKRF (environment); Convergent Technologies Design Group (audiovisual); Entuitive (curtain wall); One Lux Studio (lighting); MNLA (landscape)

Construction Manager: Turner Construction

Steel Fabrication: Banker Steel

Steel Erection: New York City Constructors

Client: The Rockefeller University

Size: 220,000 square feet

Cost: $500 million

Completion date: April 2019

SOURCES

CURTAIN WALL: Oldcastle BuildingEnvelope, AGC Interpane, TVITEC

INTERIOR GLAZING: TGP, Cristacurva

THIN BRICK: Endicott

BUILT-UP ROOFING: American Hydrotech, Carlisle

WOOD DECK: Bison Innovative Products

DOORS: Kawneer, Oldcastle BuildingEnvelope, Fleming, Scanga, Vitrocsa, McKeon, Dorma

HARDWARE: Allegion, CRL, Assa Abloy, FritsJurgens

ACOUSTICAL CEILINGS: Armstrong, Conwed

PAINTS AND STAINS: Benjamin Moore, Sherwin-Williams

WALLCOVERINGS: Construction Specialties

PLASTIC LAMINATE: Formica

FLOOR AND WALL TILE: Daltile, American Olean, Atlas Concorde, Nemo, Mosa, Stone Source, Tectura Designs

CARPET: Bentley, Mohawk, J+J Flooring

RESILIENT FLOORING: Johnsonite

RAISED FLOORING: Tate Access Floors

WIRE MESH: Cascade Architectural

OUTDOOR FURNISHINGS: Landscape Forms, Streetlife, Janus et Cie, Uhlmann

PLUMBING FIXTURES: Toto, Elkay

INTERIOR LIGHTING: Axis Lighting, Acuity Brands, Sistemalux, Litelab, Hubbel, Vibia, Legrand, Kreon, Bicasa

EXTERIOR LIGHTING: Bega, Lightolier, Erco, Eaton, Acuity Brands, Lumenpulse

UCLA Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios | Culver City, California Johnston Marklee

State of the Arts

A university converts a midcentury manufacturing building for the 21st century, unleashing a creative spirit.

BY SARAH AMELAR
PHOTOGRAPHY BY IWAN BAAN

In the mid-1980s, UCLA moved its graduate art studios six miles off campus to a former wallpaper factory in a then-industrial section of Culver City. The university purchased the boxy concrete warehouse as an economical solution to the department’s spatial needs; whether the intent was also to encourage an independent spirit in the graduate arts programs, it did just that. The corner building—completed in 1948, with classic, wood bowstring trusses overhead—was raw and durable, and the students energetically, often without restraint, coopted it. Over the years, the structure’s generous street setbacks, to its south and on its west side (where trucks originally pulled up to the loading docks), acquired clusters of small sheds, including a lean-to jerry-rigged as a woodshop and shipping containers that served as spray booths. “To say the place was adapted ad hoc,” says UCLA principal project manager John D’Amico, “is to put it nicely.” It was a messy, creative complex, without such updates as modern climate control or real accessibility. By 2010, when the university issued an RFP, an inspired overhaul was in order. The resulting project—which more than doubles the original 21,100-square-foot factory—finally reached completion this fall.

The scheme, by Los Angeles architect Johnston Marklee (JML), envisioned wrapping the building with an L-shaped addition, replacing the motley shacks (as well as modest industrial-era add-ons). But after JML’s feasibility study, in 2011, the project idled, awaiting funding. That came in 2016 with a $20 million lead gift from retired gallerist Margo Leavin, a UCLA alumna and legendary figure on Los Angeles’s art scene. Known for her eponymous gallery, active from 1970 to 2013, she embraced the opportunity to support education for future artists. “This top-rated art school was—regarding its facility—like an orphan to the university,” Leavin recalls. “It needed pride of place and a real boost. Immediately, I knew this was the project for me.”

In practical terms, the 47,900-square-foot renovation-expansion had to eliminate the main floor’s multiple level changes and update the fire protection, as well as the seismic and sustainability infrastructure. But a key conceptual question, says JML principal Sharon Johnston, “was how to create a state-of-the-art MFA facility without erasing the original spirit and culture.” The concrete building’s almost indestructible nature had clearly inspired improvisational uses—as had a defunct, wildly overgrown rail spur, along the site’s northern edge, that students had unofficially appropriated. (By 2016, the city had paved over the spur for parking, but its history still resonated with the school’s indoor-outdoor life.)

With interpretive twists, JML’s design drew on the existing building’s DNA and the original industrial character of the surrounding Hayden Tract (now a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, with tech start-ups occupying former manufacturing plants, as well as sculptural follies and larger works by architect Eric Owen Moss punctuating the area). Though the 1948 factory was poured concrete, says Johnston, “we wanted to harken back to the tilt-up vernacular, found here and elsewhere in LA.” But JML modified the technique by casting in a vertical texture of “pillows,” or rounded pilasters, lending the elevations scale and detail.

Abstractly, the design nods to classical forms, articulating this “colonnade” with a simplified plinth below and entablature-like cap above. The architects also achieved a virtually seamless exterior rhythm, with no visible distinction between the unsheathed frame and infill, by giving the exposed poured-in-place columns (to which the cast elements tie) “pillow” contours matching the tilt-up panels. The result is a continuous surface of inverse flutes, animated by light and shadow.

The approach was economical (within the $23.2 million construction budget) and sustainable (reducing heavy-materials transport in a project poised for LEED Gold certification). It was also time-effective, meeting the inflexible first-day-of-school opening date of September 30. But tight site conditions and such obstacles as power lines made the method challenging.

To envelop the arts “campus” within this shell, the architects used large, windowless expanses of wall, typical of warehouses. But they also cut out sections—as for the building’s new entry garden, at its northwest corner—veiling them in a fine-grained chain link that balances competing needs for privacy and neighborhood connections. The structure now integrates three semi-outdoor zones: besides the entry/hangout/barbeque area, planted with trees and wall-climbing vines, there’s also a sculpture-work yard and one, with loading docks, for ceramics.

While the project retained (but, in some cases, reconfigured and/or relocated) such programmatic elements as a woodshop, the “center bay” crit area, and 42 individual studios, it added an exhibition gallery, garden-side kitchen, video-shooting room, and, on the new upper level (made possible by the soaring height of the expansion), an artist-in-residence loft, a classroom, and labs.

Tying it all together—and introducing much-needed daylight—is a luminous landscape overhead. There the architects restored the existing bowstring trusses, adding seismic bracing and cutting skylights above. In the addition, they reinterpreted traditional trusswork with glulam vaults, engineered for greater, column-free spans (and enclosed in translucent polycarbonate, in the nonconditioned yards, and glass, with light-responsive, self-darkening features, as needed, elsewhere).

Regarding the program’s six areas of specialization—ceramics, painting/drawing, photography, sculpture, “New Genres,” and interdisciplinary—UCLA requested a flexible, nonhierarchical arrangement, accommodating its longtime practice of randomly assigning studios each school year by lottery, regardless of discipline. Now, in place of anonymous fire corridors and cramped labyrinths, Johnston says, “we imagined a ‘mini-city,’ with neighborhoods of studios, cul-de-sacs, and passageways—made wider than they needed to be—to give the feeling of residential streets.”

Like an invitingly blank canvas, “the architecture doesn’t compete with the art-making,” Leavin noted just before the official opening, adding, “The students have already taken over—it’s theirs!” As Johnston sees it, “We can’t wait to return over time to find out how they’ve occupied it. For us, buildings are improved by the patina of use.”

credits

Architect: Johnston Marklee — Sharon Johnston, Mark Lee, partners; Nicholas Hofstede, project manager; Lindsay Erickson, project lead; David Gray, Tori McKenna, Justin Kim, designers

Consultants: Simpson Gumpertz & Heger (structural, building envelope); KPFF Consulting Engineers (civil); ME Engineers (m/e/p/fp); Geocon (geotechnical); Horton Lees Brogden (lighting & daylighting)

General Contractor: Abbott Construction

Client: UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture

Size: 47,900 square feet (gross)

Project Cost: $25.71 million

Construction Cost: $23.19 million

Completion date: September 2019

SOURCES

Glulam Beams: Calvert Company

Cast-in-Place/Tilt-Up Concrete: Largo Concrete

Form-liner Panels: Fitzgerald Formliners

Built-Up Pvc Roofing: Sika Sarnafil

Barrel-Vault Polycarbonate Roofing: Gallina USA, Duo-Gard Industries

Windows: US Aluminum, Arcadia

Glazing: Guardian, SageGlass, YKK,Duo-Gard, Amerilux

Entrances: Steelcraft, Oregon Door, US Aluminum, Cornell Doors, Wayne Dalton

Conveyance: Otis Elevator

Plumbing: Zurn, Duravit, Chicago Faucets

Mui Ho Fine Arts Library | Ithaca, New York | STV and Wolfgang Tschapeller

Levitation Room

An early 20th-century building, once home to architecture studios, is transformed into Cornell University’s new fine-arts library.

BY ALEX KLIMOSKI

For over a century, Rand Hall, a three-story 1911 yellow-brick building at the northeast corner of Cornell University’s Arts Quad in Ithaca, New York, was defined by its industrial fenestration—a grid of generously sized steel casement windows. Formerly home to undergraduate and graduate architecture studios, Rand’s operable single-glazed openings revealed to passersby the messy vitality of students hard at work. The building ceased functioning as such when the adjacent Milstein Hall, the expansive, dramatically cantilevered structure designed by OMA (RECORD, February 2012) became the architecture department’s new, state-of-the-art academic hub. Now Rand’s large apertures have been retrofitted with monolithic, highly reflective 12-foot-wide double-glazed windows, which lend the facade a more austere, and slightly surreal aesthetic—an outward expression of the new 26,650-square-foot Mui Ho Fine Arts Library it now houses.

The completion of Rand Hall’s renovation in August was the last step in a series of reconfigurations within the college of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP) prompted by the construction of Milstein. For many years, the fine-arts library had been in the two-story space below the dome of Sibley Hall—a classical-style building bordering Milstein—which has been converted by New York–based LevenBetts into administrative offices, crit and pinup spaces, and student workstations. In 2014, with a $6 million gift commitment from Mui Ho—a Berkeley-based architect and former educator who received her B.Arch. from Cornell—then-dean Kent Kleinman invited four architecture firms, including Herzog & de Meuron, to submit proposals to renovate Rand. The brief included the relocation of the library to its upper two levels—which connect to Milstein’s studios—and the conversion of 8,000 square feet on the ground level into new fabrication shops and makerspaces. Vienna-based architect and AAP alumnus Wolfgang Tschapeller was selected for his idea of having the stacks appear as a towering volume levitating within a cavernous space.

Achieving the floating effect required a major structural intervention, which simultaneously made the historic building compliant with current codes, including those for seismic and wind loads. The ground level’s column grid and the floor slab above it were left intact, while the second and third levels were gutted, removing the upper slab and the vertical structure to create a singular 40-foot-high light-filled space. The roof line was raised 7 feet above the previous sawtooth configuration’s lowest point, and a new system of 20 steel beams that span 50 feet from the north to south exterior walls was installed. Vertical steel hangers, to which three levels of shelves are fastened, are suspended from the nearly 2-foot-deep beams, which also support tie-down hooks that accommodate outdoor installations on the rooftop. A spine of replacement columns, hidden between the stacks, supports the beams. To handle the redistribution of loads, the architects embedded a steel framework within the masonry facade, in between the window bays, and reinforced the foundation in certain areas.

Tschapeller, who worked with New York–based engineering and architecture firm STV, used a highly efficient mezzanine shelving system: each level is scaled according to the number of books, allowing for a capacity of more than 120,000 volumes. The steel armature, hovering 4 feet above the floor, is fastened to the slab only by sway-control cables. Grated catwalks permit ventilation within the stacks and allow access to the books, while the frame’s thin profile showcases the immensity of the library’s collection; two bridges—one on each of the upper shelf levels—connect the framework to Rand’s entrance atrium and egress stair. “Books are heavy, yet they contain knowledge, stories, and images, which are essentially weightless,” explains Tschapeller about the inspiration for his unusual design. “We wanted to construct a paradoxical situation—something with enormous gravity hanging from the skies.” The architect had previously used a floating shelving system for a library in the museum of Sigmund Freud’s apartment at Berggasse 19 in Vienna, although he cantilevered the shelves from the bearing walls there instead of hanging them from the roof.

On a bright day, the suspended skeleton’s silvery sheen and svelte form foster an ethereal ambience. But the dominant idea driving the design of this new double-height space does not allow for a variety of study areas. A line of desks along the south wall, with movable chairs and tables beside the stacks, and individual workstations at the northern end of each shelf bay, seem like an afterthought. Although the transparency of the design floods the space with natural light, it doesn’t provide the private nooks that students are drawn to, or places for collaborative study—it appears more like a glamorous warehouse. The four feet of unusuable space below the stacks takes away from other potential functions.

While the immovable shelving system glorifies the physicality and accessibility of books, the shifting programmatic requirements of libraries in the digital age are less considered. Even though the library will continue to acquire print volumes into the near future, the decision to purchase either print or electronic formats is decided partly on the basis of user need, says architecture librarian Martha Walker. However valuable physical books are in the dissemination of knowledge, continued improvements in processing and display technologies will probably reduce their necessity for future generations of students. But, given the very foundation of the library’s architecture holdings—which were built upon the extensive private collection of Andrew Dickson White, the university’s first president—the volumes now in Rand Hall are “especially valued because of their importance to the history and growth of Cornell,” says Carl A. Kroch University Librarian Gerald R. Beasley. The resulting project is a monument to the school’s illustrious legacy, but also to a single-minded design concept that, although meant to inspire students, does not represent a flexible 21st-century learning environment.

credits

Architect of Record: STV — David Miles Ziskind, principal in charge; Harris Feinn, project manager; David Scheck, project architect

Design Architect: Wolfgang Tschapeller — Niklavs Paegle, Christian Gattringer, Jürgis Gecys, Christina Jauernik, Gonzalo Vaillo Martinez, Bojana Vucinic, design team

Engineer: STV (m/e/p)

General Contractor: Welliver

Consultants: Transsolar (climate design); Fischer Marantz Stone, Pokorny Lichtdesign (light); Olaf Eigenbrodt (library)

Client: Cornell University

Size: 26,650 square feet

Completion date: August 2019

SOURCES

Structural Floor Grating: Progress Architektura

Metal Wall panels: Mitsubishi Alpolic

Glazed Aluminum Curtain Wall: Oldcastle BuildingEnvelope

Ira H. Rubenzahl Student Learning Commons | Springfield, Massachusetts | Ann Beha Architects

Farewell to Arms

A historic warehouse in a former national armory is converted into a welcoming student center.

BY ALEX KLIMOSKI
Photography By Chuck Choi

From the TIME of the Revolutionary War until the Vietnam War, the Springfield Armory in central Massachusetts served as an important small arms manufacturer for the U.S. military; it reached its peak production point during World War II, when nearly 50 percent of its workforce was composed of Women Ordnance Workers (WOWs)—the inspiration for the iconic image of Rosie the Riveter. When the arsenal was decommissioned in 1968, Springfield Technical Community College (STCC) took over various structures across its 55-acre campus. The institution’s newest facility, converted from a 156-year-old warehouse, is the Ira H. Rubenzahl Learning Commons, designed by Boston-based Ann Beha Architects.

A national historic landmark, the two-story building, previously known as the Long Storehouse, was constructed between 1846 and 1863 in the style of French cavalry barracks. Originally built as a storage facility to stow black walnut lumber used for musket stocks, the 764-foot-long, 55-foot-wide masonry-and-wood structure was also used over the years as horse stables, an X-ray facility, and a cryptology lab before falling into disuse. Located amidst the college’s main cluster of academic buildings, and near the primary student parking lot at the campus’s northern edge, the long, slender structure had been vacant for decades. The architects’ 2014 feasibility study recommended that it be adapted to accommodate much-needed gathering spaces and student services facilities.

In upgrading the building for 21st-century use while preserving its integrity, one of the biggest “knots to untie,” says Philip Chen, Ann Beha project manager, was preparing the building—whose systems were absent or woefully outdated—to be populated by people. The project required major infrastructural prep work, including the creation of new electrical and water-drainage systems. To slip new mechanicals into the building while maintaining its historic character, the architects raised the second-level floor, creating a cavity between it and the first-floor ceiling. On the second level, they inserted a soffit down the middle of the ceiling to conceal additional systems, while leaving the timber beams exposed on either side. Structurally, the warehouse, which had been reinforced in 1940 with additional steel columns, was robust; however, it required the insertion of 24 two-story concrete shear walls throughout to meet seismic code.

The Long Storehouse’s narrow form, which the architects describe as a “horizontal shaft,” also made programming a challenge. “It wasn’t only about physical relocation but the rethinking of how these departments work together,” says Chen. The goal was to create a welcome center that would also be a one-stop shop for student services, which had previously been scattered around campus, making the admissions and enrollment processes cumbersome. As a solution, the design team broke down the interior into four hubs—enrollment, academic advising, student-life spaces, and the learning commons. The administrative functions are clustered at the building’s western half, while the student areas, which include social spaces on the ground level and a library and reading areas on the second and attic levels, are spread out across the eastern half. To avoid “tunnel vision,” the architects created meandering circulation routes, shifting from central double-loaded corridors to single-loaded ones along the building’s perimeter.

Materials were kept simple and durable. Concrete floors and exposed shear walls, as well as custom steel administrative desks, add to the building’s industrial character, and built-in beech-wood benches nod to the original Eastern white pine and Douglas fir columns and beams. Some walls are painted in bold colors—yellow, red, and purple—to distinguish the different functions. Generously glazed interior walls allow light to filter into the building’s core.

With guidance from the National Park Service, which shares the campus with STCC, the architects worked to restore the building’s front facade, whose surface, composed of 58 window bays, is over 50 percent fenestration. To announce entry points in a subtle yet legible way, the design team installed weathering steel canopies at four different bays along the exterior wall. At these locations, they kept the window apertures free of glazing and inserted glass walls, three of them set back 6½ feet and one 1 foot, to create sheltered outdoor spaces. New high-performance windows have thin steel exterior louvers, which replace the historic wood ones that once promoted natural ventilation in the warehouse.

At the building’s front, the architects transformed an asphalt parking lot into a landscaped area with tables and benches, extending the gathering spaces to the outdoors. Completed in December of last year, the Learning Commons celebrates the campus’s storied roots while activating what was once a dead zone. Whereas the structure’s commanding horizontal presence had previously created a physical barrier, now, with the varied spaces it provides—from quiet study areas to transparent conference rooms and open community zones—it serves as the primary congregating point both for students and faculty. “The best way to preserve a building is to make it well-used,” says Chen. “We just had to reveal what it could do.”

credits

Architect: Ann Beha Architects — Philip Chen, principal; Robert Carroll, Jacqueline Mossman, Ric Panciera, Rita Terjeki, George Faber, Ian Ford, design team

Engineers: RSE (structural); Altieri Sebor Wieber (m/e/p); Nitsch (civil); The Green Engineer (sustainability)

Consultants: Jensen Hughes (code); Sladen Feinstein (lighting); IBI (landscape); Public Archaeological Laboratory (archaeology); Jaffe Holden (acoustics); Structures North (wood framing); Preservation Technology Associates (masonry); BVH (audiovisual)

Client: Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance

Size: 100,000 square feet

Cost: $50 million

Completion date: December 2018

SOURCES

Aluminum Storefront: Kawneer

Glazing: Vitro; SaftiFirst; C.R. Laurence

Doors: VT Industries; Cascade Coil; McKeon

Acoustical Ceilings: Armstrong; Certainteed

Suspension Grid: Armstrong

Paints And Stains: Sherwin-Williams

Plastic Laminate: Formica

Solid Surfacing: Silestone

Floor and Wall Tile: Daltile

Resilient Flooring: Armstrong, Norament

Elevators: Schindler

Plumbing: Kohler

More Than Academic

A set of recent campus buildings with ambitious performance goals fosters collaboration and reflects changing values.

BY CHARLES LINN, FAIA

The voices of college students have long been among the loudest clamoring for meaningful action to combat climate change. And universities have shown they share these values by commissioning buildings that aggressively pursue energy efficiency. Among the most recent projects are a group of standouts that smartly integrate extensive use of transparency, abundant daylighting, and natural ventilation. Amherst College’s Science Center, the Keller Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Chicago, and SDE4, a building for the School of Design & Environment at the National University of Singapore, all fuse resource conservation with strategies that create welcoming spaces and encourage collaboration, showing students what a sustainable future could look like.

It is hard to imagine that a science building could be one of the most popular hangouts on any campus, but making such a building was very much on the minds of Boston-based Payette Associates when they began designing the new Science Center to replace a 50-year-old building at Amherst, in western Massachusetts. In addition to desiring a building that would be state-of-the-art and highly energy efficient, the college hoped to reinforce the idea that deep explorations of science are an integral part of a liberal-arts education. “Amherst wants to celebrate science and demystify it,” says Payette principal Robert Schaeffner.

The 230,000-square-foot building is roughly E-shaped in plan, with three pavilions containing offices, study spaces, and classrooms projecting from the main volume, which houses a three-story commons and labs. To make science seem less enigmatic, the building has been designed so that the corridors and laboratories are enclosed in glass, visible from many parts of the campus through the commons’s three-story glazed curtain wall. Seventy-two percent of the floorplate has some direct view to the outside, and lab spaces enjoy views of the Pelham Hills to the east.

The 400-foot-long commons is the true star of the Science Center. Its west-facing orientation is not ideal, but solar radiation is controlled by low-E-coated triple-glazing and automated shades at the second and third levels. Motorized awning-style windows located over the four entries on the first floor are opened by the building automation system (BAS) to permit natural ventilation when temperature and humidity levels are right. Otherwise, supply air is provided by displacement diffusers located near the floor, while radiant heating and cooling run through the concrete slab and that of the balconies that overlook the commons.

The entire roof of the commons is covered by rows of roof monitors, which integrate multiple systems. Each monitor is supported by its own cantilevered steel beam, from which the curtain wall is also hung. Glazed, north-facing panels admit generous amounts of daylight, diffused by double-curved suspended ceiling panels, while south-facing photovoltaic (PV) panels are mounted on the outside of the monitors. Radiant cooling, sound attenuation, and lighting are also incorporated into the underside of the panels.

Laboratories are voracious consumers of energy because they contain lots of heat-generating equipment and exhaust large amounts of conditioned air through fume hoods. At Amherst, they are cooled year-round. But to conserve energy, air that has already been circulated through offices and corridors is drawn into the negatively pressurized labs and supplemented with additional ventilation when sensors detect that fumes are being created by experiments.

Placement of the offices and classrooms—the programmatic elements that the architects refer to as “low-energy”—in the projecting pavilions, with their own dedicated air-handling units, was another conservation strategy. Similarly to the commons, these spaces benefit from natural ventilation, which is admitted through operable facade panels. Although these are automated in classrooms, in the offices they are manually controlled. When sensors in the rooftop weather station send a signal to the BAS to indicate that the conditions are suitable, a green LED in the offices lights up to indicate that the panels can be opened (occupants also receive an e-mail notification).

Overall, the Amherst Science Center’s energy use intensity, or EUI (annual energy use divided by floor area), comes in at 91 kBtu per square foot per year, which is about 76 percent below a typical laboratory building, and 80 percent less than the building it replaces.

Students at the Harris School of Public Policy in Chicago, many of whom are focused on social and environmental issues, learn their craft at the Keller Center, a three-story building designed by Edward Durell Stone and opened in 1962. The 256-foot-wide structure resembles his American Embassy in New Delhi, sitting atop a 5-foot-high plinth, surrounded by a colonnade supporting deep roof overhangs. Two Chicago firms, Farr Associates and Woodhouse Tinucci Architects, have completely restored the exterior and opened up the interior in dramatic fashion.

The limestone- and precast-clad concrete-frame structure was originally the Kellogg Center for Continuing Education, a conference center and hotel, and was later made into a dorm. By the time the university began considering repurposing the building for the public-policy school, its mechanical systems were completely outdated and its previous use as housing so incompatible with its new program that the architects needed to entirely gut the interior. They sawed out concrete floor and roof slabs throughout the building to create open, light-filled spaces that reflect the Harris School’s attitude toward public-policy education. “The school uses a data-driven approach across multiple disciplines, treating policy-making like a science, to give it transparency,” says Farr associate principal Gabriel Wilcox. He maintains that leaving the cut concrete and rebar exposed is one version of transparency in architecture, while the new glazed walls that allow visibility into classrooms and study pods is another, more literal one. The aim is “to increase collaboration and engagement—to put policy on display so that you could see the activity and rigor as you step inside the door.”

Wilcox points to the Forum, the newly created four-story central atrium. The multilevel gathering space is finished in wood salvaged from Chicago Park District ash trees killed by invasive insects. It is topped by three rows of roof monitors and surrounded by glass walls that allow views into seminar and classrooms. The south-facing triple-layered fiberglass skylights admit daylight that bounces off curved white panels to soften and diffuse it. When the sun is high in the sky during the summer, exterior overhangs shade the fiberglass panels.

The new mechanical systems include radiant heating and cooling panels that are about 35 percent more efficient than conventional systems. The building’s performance was further enhanced by adding insulation to the exterior walls and the roof. Existing operable casement windows in offices along the perimeter of Keller were retained to save money and reduce embodied energy (the energy used in the production of a building). However, sliding windows were installed over them on the interior. When occupants desire natural ventilation, they open both the sliders and the casements. To prevent condensation, the office air-conditioning is automatically shut off.

With the addition of a rooftop PV system, which provides about 11 percent of the building’s energy, the LEED Platinum Keller Center maximizes all possible LEED energy points and achieves an EUI of 48 kBtu per square foot per year—a 46 percent reduction over the rating system’s baseline model. Wilcox is particularly proud that the project has also claimed the Living Building Challenge’s Materials Petal, which is especially relevant to Harris’s policy mission. It includes a prohibition against using materials containing ingredients on the certification system’s “Red List”—a group of chemicals commonly found in building products despite being harmful to humans and the environment.

The tropical climate of Singapore, the location of the School of Design & Environment building SDE4, is a striking contrast to the temperate zones of Chicago and Amherst. Maximizing energy conservation here was a project mandate. The administration wanted students to learn to design in a building that set the energy bar as high as possible—net zero—in order to challenge them to live up to that standard for the rest of their careers.

Serie + Multiply Architects of London, with Surbana Jurong of Singapore- and Germany-based climate engineers Transsolar Energietechnik, designed SDE4 to produce as much energy on its site as it consumes annually. The 91,000-square-foot, six-story building needed generous windows that would connect students to views of the lush surrounding landscape, and few interior walls. “Learning is far more social today,” said Chris Lee, principal of Serie + Multiply. “We needed to make learning visible. So the study, critique, and presentation spaces are designed in such a way that they can be seen from multiple angles within the building.”

Lee found inspiration in vernacular precedents such as Malay houses, which have large overhanging roofs. They are built on stilts with wide front elevations to capture breezes, but are otherwise shallow in depth. The 252-foot-wide south elevation of SDE4 looks toward the sea, but the building’s footprint is only about 88 feet deep. Its oversailing roof projects about 52 feet beyond the top-floor facade to provide shading while allowing extra area for PV panels.

Large parts of the second and third levels have no walls, left open to the elements for natural ventilation, and the east and west walls of the building are set back from perforated metal screens. These provide shade in the morning and late afternoon without completely blocking the view. The screens are designed so that they can be removed and substituted with experimental materials and assemblies for facade-research projects.

On the top two floors, studio spaces run almost the entire length of the building. Adjacent classroom, model-making, and workshop spaces are separated from the studios by glass walls. To control glare, exterior light can be blocked by user-operated roller shades, but “lamellas”—panels of horizontal metal fins—start about 6½ feet from the floor and extend to the ceiling. These direct the light onto the ceiling plane rather than screening it out entirely.

Transsolar used a number of modeling programs to refine the SDE4’s facade and envelope geometry and to design what Wolfgang Kessling, one of Transsolar’s directors, calls a hybrid cooling system. Full conventional air-conditioning is supplied only to those spaces where it is absolutely essential, such as computer labs. But most of the building is cooled to higher temperatures and humidity levels than is typical. Ceiling fans help compensate. “I’m taking care of the excess humidity, but I’m not overdrying the air. I’m taking care of excessive temperature, but I’m not overcooling the air,” says Kessling. “When I combine these two things with air movement, people are comfortable.” Occupants also have the option of opening sliding glass panels to let in fresh air, and then the hybrid cooling is automatically shut off.

Kessling says the strategy is performing well. Although the rooftop PVs are capable of producing only about 500 megawatt hours of electricity annually (roughly a quarter of the energy a building with this use in this climate would typically consume), SDE4 is operating at net positive. Now, 10 months after opening, it has produced 30 percent more energy than it has used, demonstrating the potential of design to help mitigate the climate crisis.

More buildings like SDE4, Amherst’s Science Center, and Keller—projects that provide healthy environments, superior energy performance, and the inspiration that comes from inhabiting beautiful architecture—would give students a measure of confidence that the future will be bright.

Charles Linn, FAIA, is a Lawrence, Kansas–based writer and architect and a former deputy editor of ARCHITECTURAL RECORD.