University

The Wood Innovation Design Centre (WIDC) serves as a gathering place for researchers, academics, and design professionals generating ideas for innovative uses of wood. The lower floors of the building provide facilities dedicated to education in Integrated Wood Design. Upper floors provide office space for government and wood industry-related organizations. The eight-story building stands 97 feet tall — the world’s tallest modern all-timber office building, a benchmark soon to be surpassed by other mass timber buildings.

The proposal for the new Torcuato Di Tella University building is presented as a rigorously open organization that integrates the diversity of the campus into a single spatial and structural system. The campus contains particular rhythms and sequences: on the one hand, the large volume on Avenida Figueroa Alcorta with its grid of imposing columns and capitals; on the other, the sheds with their series of frames and cantilevers. The proposal combines both orders proposing an integrated modularity in the cloister of its location.

Cleveland State University’s highly regarded School of Engineering struggled to meet the demands of a 21st-century engineering education in a cramped, aging facility. The tight, urban site constricted available workspace, while the at-capacity building offered little flexibility to accommodate renovations without disrupting operations.

The new campus construction project of Shanghai University of science and technology is one of the major projects in Shanghai launched in 2012. The living area for teachers and students is located in the University of science and technology, which is an important part of the project. It provides the university with living service facilities such as accommodation, catering, leisure activities, foreign exchange, etc.

Based on the concept of the Silent-Green Cultural Quarter to create a public campus for cinematic art, the new building complements the historical domed building of the former crematorium with studios and group work rooms (300 sqm) for the German Goethe Institute’s worldwide scholarship programme for artists and interested groups. In close cooperation with Berlin’s upper authority for the protection of historical monuments, the studio building was developed as a restrained yet self-confident structure that enters into a formal dialogue with the main building, the domed hall. The aim was also to interweave the appearance of the building with that of the garden, in which the studio house grows together with the garden over the seasons through an all-round enclosure with seasonal climbing plants.

The new 30,000-square-foot addition to Vanderbilt’s School of Nursing was initially conceived as a vertical expansion of the existing Frist Hall to accommodate the School’s continued growth and ensure the School will continue to attract and recruit the best students and faculty. After initial programmatic development proved vertical expansion infeasible, the design team proposed an innovative atrium-based approach.

The North West Cambridge Development (NWCD) transforms a 150-hectare site of University of Cambridge farmland into a community with residential buildings, academic facilities, public amenities, and open green space. Mecanoo worked alongside NWCD to deliver 232 affordable housing units for researchers and key university employees.

Walters & Cohen Architects balances industrial heritage with contemporary design at the new International College for The King’s School, Canterbury. In 2016, The King’s School in Canterbury asked London-based practice, Walters & Cohen Architects, to undertake a feasibility study for a 1.25-hectare ex-industrial site on the edge of Canterbury’s city centre. The study resulted in an updated masterplan for the site that includes an International College, staff housing, and a sports court with changing facilities. It also included a new drama centre and theatre in the 19th-century Malthouse building, which was undertaken by another practice.