Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut engaged us to solve a unique question. How do we adapt a half-built bookstore and café into a new college building that houses their Neuroscience & Media Arts departments?
Working with an existing structure and floor plate, our design team created a building that pairs a student learning space alongside a public thoroughfare. This allows for the large performance spaces to be embedded in the building, and creates a natural break point between the two disparate programs.
The design adapts the existing pitched roof by extending and altering its form. The result will transform the previously planned entry tower into a double height Student Art Gallery. When completed, the gallery will become the beacon for the entrance off the street and is replicated with a more sculptural entrance at the north of the building, bookending the student commons space within.
Construction for new Trinity College building commenced in November 2016, and we are on track to seeing the completed transformation from bookstore to campus heart in time for summer of 2017.
The 2025 OpenLAB Boston studio work will be exhibited at Virginia Tech Monday, March 2nd through Wednesday, March 4th.
Please join us for the following events on Monday, March 2nd:
11:00am - Lecture with Parke MacDowell
1:00pm Lobby talk with Kevin Sullivan
This year’s studio identifies seven sites along the frayed edges of Boston’s Greenway. The Greenway is a one-mile-long linear park running through the heart of the city, reconnecting downtown Boston with its waterfront. Many of the parcels along its edges remain undeveloped and present mute, blank facades to the public realm. Addressing and repairing these edges through acts of infilling, layering, grafting, framing, and placemaking is the core focus of the studio—SUTURE.