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.
Opening later this year, the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, MA is an essay in the tuning of building façades for performance. The aluminum sunshades that veil the building began as a concept tested by scoring Bristol paper. The team utilized tools from all modalities: paper models, CNC-mills, parametric studies, solar analysis, wind and water simulations and full-scale mock-ups to inform the design and drive energy use down. The ultra-high performance building is tracking a 61% reduction in energy use compared to the 2030 baseline.
#earthweek #designalways #buildingscience #performalism #cambridge #bostonarchitecture