GRADUATE AEROSPACE LABORATORIES
Our client is a university department renowned for pioneering some of the world’s most important advances in aeronautics and space exploration. It asked us to transform its run-down, disorganized, and outdated facilities into a dynamic environment that would reflect the new types of research activities, professors, and students that occupy it. In reworking their 33,000 s.f., historically-protected building, we sought to accomplish the following goals: Find formal and spatial analogies for the department’s research; provide it with a new identity as it enters a new era; maximize transparency to promote creative interaction; and celebrate its history. In accomplishing these objectives, we explored a wide range of digital design and construction tools and successfully expressed the spirit of innovation and invention that takes place there.
Given the variety of topics that the department’s faculty and students research, pinpointing a formal starting point for our design was a challenge. Today, aerospace includes everything from looking at the way blood cells flow through our bodies to literal rocket science. One might find a scientist designing an artificial heart, while next door there is a team collaborating on a new Mars Rover with NASA or JPL. How to be inclusive?
We ultimately derived much of our formal language from the notion of FLOW. Almost all aerospace research involves the study of flow – understanding how solids, liquids, and gases behave under differential pressures. We began to think of the building as a sort of wind tunnel - a relatively neutral container into which we could drop objects in the form of new ceilings and wrappers - and metaphorically study their flow patterns as they interface with existing walls, columns, and voids. By gathering together all of the spaces under this rubric, we attained a very specific expression for each. We also created highly functional spaces, fulfilling every nitty-gritty requirement of the academic labs, classrooms, conference facilities, and offices that comprise the program.
The program is divided into the following distinct spaces:
1. Building Lobby: The lobby is used for public events and is a central venue for interactive dialogue. Its new suspended composite resin ceiling flows in front of the building’s entrance. Its topography is formed in reaction to light sources above; each source “pulls” at the ceiling’s surface, creating a dimple.
2. First Floor Laboratory: This laboratory contains a small museum for research artifacts.
3. Second Floor interactive lounge: Its new suspended ceiling flows around the existing structure and defines a social “cavity” pinned between the exterior wall of the building and a new lab.
4. Second Floor Lab: This teaching lab occupies the central area of the second floor.
5. Second Floor Conference Room and Archives: In this expanded conference and exhibition facility, the sound-absorbing felt ceiling represents a famous flow diagram. The glass, acrylic, and steel table performs both display and conference functions.
6. Third Floor Conference Room and Display: We transformed a landlocked area into an interactive node containing a conference room and flowing display wall. |
