This proposed project is located in the center of a well-known technological institute, on a site currently occupied by a small, outdated building that does not maximize the land’s potential.  It is surrounded by a mature landscape of ground cover and trees, as well as other academic buildings of various ages and sizes.

Program:

The proposed program includes approximately 143,000 sf (square feet) of science and engineering laboratories, offices, classrooms (including a 120-seat lecture hall), conference rooms, and open collaboration space on five floors - two below grade, and three above.

Cost:

The building budget has not been identified at this point but is likely to be in the range of $150 million.

Design Solution:

Interaction and Community: Research buildings are no longer about solitary scientists toiling away in their offices or laboratories. The problems are so complicated that a high degree of interdisciplinary collaboration is required to make important breakthroughs. To encourage this kind of interactivity, a great deal of open collaboration space has been integrated into the layout, as well as a high degree of transparency and an atrium; these serve to visually and physically connect the  various people and activities housed in the facility.

Atrium: The atrium introduces natural light from a large rooftop skylight which penetrates to the laboratories in the basement levels, providing them with a level of illumination and visibility that they usually do not receive. This is especially important since the facility’s 10,000 sf clean room –  often the highlight of a tour of this kind of building – is located in the sub-basement, where the least vibrations are.

The first floor contains the classrooms, while the second floor contains a lecture hall that spills out onto a large gathering space which will be used for receptions, presentations, and additional collaboration efforts. It sits in the widest part of the atrium, which is further surrounded by additional offices, conference rooms, and laboratories.

Exterior Form: The building’s exterior design is intended to be simultaneously forward-looking, suggestive of the research that goes on inside, and contextual with its surroundings. The curve at its southwest corner puts it in playful dialogue with the round Beckman auditorium and eases the directional shift in the existing pathways. The building’s main entrances are oriented to the most significant of those circulation paths, integrating the building’s patterns into the fabric of the campus.

Materials / Image: Although parts of the building are clad in clear glass, and others in opaque panels, its primary cladding system is composed of office-sized frames, which are glazed with clear glass covered with various colors of ceramic frits. Along one side of each framed section is a vertical band composed of white circles, while along the bottom is a horizontal band integrating colored dots that hide the furniture one often (and unfortunately) sees in floor-to-ceiling glazing. Across the two main facades of the building, the colors change according to the rainbow’s R-O-Y-G-B-I-V pattern, which alludes to the fact that so much of the facility’s research involves the study and manipulation of light.