Establishing a New Home on Campus

When designing academic science buildings, PAYETTE considers which elements—programmatic, architectural, site-specific, perhaps even symbolic—will be most successful in bringing a School’s academic community together. And not just for class and events, but for informal gatherings, small group learning and chance encounters. What will engage students and make them want to spend time in this place, particularly if their classes or research efforts might be conducted elsewhere? What will draw faculty back from their respective problem sites to spend time with their colleagues?

This approach was particularly crucial for PAYETTE when designing both the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University and  Environment Hall: Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. Both projects needed to establish a new campus home for their schools, the School of Public Health and the School of the Environment, respectively, providing a singular and central place that did not previously exist. Both projects also needed this new home to experience a strong connection to its surrounding context, achieved through the strategic use of transparency. Though these two projects are housed in very different settings—urban Washington DC for the Milken Institute SPH and rural North Carolina for the Environment Hall—this connection is similarly important to the mission of both schools.

The Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University is the only school of public health in Washington, DC. While the university’s medical center was founded in 1824, the School of Public Health was only established recently in 1997 and had never had a true “home.” Instead, its seven departments previously occupied space in various university buildings and several leased locations in and around GW’s Foggy Bottom campus. This project, a signature new building for the School, creates a singular identity to the general public.

Just blocks from the White House, the Milken Institute SPH draws heavily upon its location in the heart of the country’s “policy capital” to attract local legislators, practitioners and researchers to bring real-world perspective to public health education. The architecture reinforces this connection through the design of the building’s atrium, as well as the façade.

The atrium offers unparalleled views of Washington Circle Park. The building’s classrooms float within this vibrant, six-story student activity and study space that overlooks Washington Circle, one of the most important public spaces created in L’Enfant’s 1791 Plan for Washington, DC. This strategy enables people on the outside of the building to look in and see students at work. It is a powerful vehicle for communicating how an academic institution dedicated to public health functions in the heart of the nation’s healthcare capital.

The façade, also working to strengthen the school’s connection to DC, faces northeast with large floor-to-ceiling expanses of glass that maximize the amount of northerly light pushed deep into the study areas and offer premium views for students. It also allows students to better appreciate the significance of where they are studying, ensuring a certain level of interface with the surrounding policy hub.

As one of the world’s premier schools for the study of environmental science and policy, the Nicholas School seeks to understand the earth, its inhabitants and the environment as an integrated whole by addressing today’s critical issues in the fields of climate and energy, terrestrial and marine ecosystems and human health and the environment. The primary design challenge was to establish a new home for the School, embodying this mission, by consolidating its faculty, students and programs, previously dispersed across campus, into a single precinct consisting of a new high-performance classroom and departmental office building paired with the existing, robust Levine Science Research Center. Given the project’s prominent location, the client desired a transparent beacon to signify a new architectural language for campus buildings. Reconciling this desire for transparency with the imperative for thermal performance and sustainability was paramount.

Environment Hall, the new front door for the School, appropriately employs low-energy sustainable building systems aimed at reducing the project’s environmental impact and serving as a teaching tool for the School and its community. As a living laboratory, the project seeks to blur the boundary between inside and outside as a means of reinforcing the goal of building-as-environmental classroom. Much of the research by students within the school is conducted outside the confines of the building and across the world. The building serves as a “base camp” to which students return and share their findings.

Due to the school’s curriculum and the importance it places on the outside world, spaces within the building enjoy a strong connection to the exterior, due in large part to the building’s narrow footprint. The iconic environmental building reflects the pedagogy of the school with its focus on experiential learning, combining classroom with field, and theory with practice.

Both Environment Hall and the Milken Institute SPH function as new front doors for their schools. The use of transparency in each building makes a significant statement about the academic community within and fosters collaboration both within the building and with the community at-large.