University building

The Student Life project includes the construction of the new living spaces for students, passive outdoor areas for common use, access to the existing street, and the corresponding infrastructure. The proposed new building will have six floors and approximately 182,810 square feet to accommodate the program, projected to have the capacity for 552 students with different types of bedrooms, including single, double and quadruple rooms. The building’s functionality and aesthetics will strategically respond to the surrounding areas activities, from pedestrian activity within the campus, down to the interactions between the students and the community. The Student Life Project’s objective is to become an example of student residentia... More

Construction company Harris CM is working on a £1.7m contract that will see an existing office building transformed into an innovative workspace which will form part of a Yorkshire media centre. The Pontefract-based firm was appointed by Barnsley Council to refurbish the 24,433 sq ft, four storey building that will become part of the town’s Digital Media Centre.The work on the building, which is located in Barnsley town centre on County Way, is due to complete in May 2020. Last month it was revealed that DMC 02 will help to create over 100 digitally skilled jobs in the local economy. Known as DMC 02, the building will provide eight large offices over three floors, with a ground floor co-working space and a brand new maker spac... More

“The blue copper effectively gave the closest visual match to a natural patinated copper in our opinion – without the 25-year wait for the weather to do the job for us.” Richard Murphy Architects have created a new campus for Anglia Ruskin University, announced by a dramatic curved façade clad in tiered layers of blue-coloured pre-patinated copper. The three buildings comprising the new campus (built by principal Design and Build contractors R G Carter Cambridge Ltd.) share the same external facing brickwork, structured by dark metal detailing. In contrast, vertical standing-seam cladding in pre-patinated copper accentuates the curved facades of the lecture theatre. Richard Murphy Architects’ Director J... More

Designing functional buildings operating in high altitudes with extremely cold climates is a challenge for even the most talented professionals. It requires in-depth knowledge of the area, the climate pattern, direction and amount of the sun’s rays, façade design, and etcetera; amongst a lot of other factors. For example, let us take into consideration Leh, a town in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. It is a mountain dominated landscape at an altitude of 3,500m. Experiencing a cold desert like climate, Leh has long, unforgiving winters from November to early March, with minimum temperature falling well below freezing for most of the winter season. The weather in the remaining months is generally warm during the day. Due to... More

The 96,631-square-foot Ernest E. Tschannen Science Complex at California State University, Sacramento (Sac State), designed by Los Angeles-based CO Architects, serves as an educational and cultural hub for students, faculty, visitors, and the greater Sacramento community.  The new five-story, $91.5-million building features a state-of-the-art, energy-efficient, light-filled science facility providing teaching and research laboratories for the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.  According to the university, the facility is designed as a space for students to investigate solutions for climate change, healthy aging, and many other worldwide challenges.   Set on the banks of the American River, the facility provides in... More

The interdisciplinary Tata Hall for the Sciences, designed by CO Architects, increases research capacity at the University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego), and provides a new hub for teaching and scholarly engagement.  The 130,000-square-foot, seven-floor building combines research and teaching from two different departments, biology and chemistry.  Recognizing that many scientific breakthroughs occur through interdisciplinary collaboration, UC San Diego required research labs to be designed to encourage interaction, with work benches grouped together in an open area, rather than in separate spaces, which is common in typical lab layouts.  Specialized research procedure rooms are situated at the ends of the building t... More

On the industrial site of the former monofilament manufacturer Viscosuisse and today’s Monosuisse AG in Emmenbrücke, a new urban district, to be known as the Viscosistadt, will be developed in the near future. While preserving the diversity of the existing buildings, the urban quality of the site will be further strengthened and developed. The first measure is the conversion of Building 745 into the new location for the Lucerne School of Art and Design.   Part of the Viscosuisse legacy, this strongly expressive building shapes the character of the site. The structure has wide spans and is made up of columns, down-beams and prefabricated ribbed concrete ceiling slabs, producing generously sized, uninterrupted spaces. In ord... More

Grafton Architects unveils ‘Warehouse of Ideas’ for Kingston UniversityRIBA Gold Medal winner Grafton Architects completes its first UK building for Kingston University   The recipient of this year’s RIBA Gold Medal, Grafton Architects, has completed Town House – a £50m landmark teaching building for Kingston University in London. The Dublin-based practice was selected to design the scheme from a five-strong shortlist following a competition initiated by Kingston University in conjunction with RIBA in 2013. Designed to act as the University’s front door and a gateway to Kingston upon Thames, Town House is part of a new vision for Kingston, encouraging informal learning and building stronger links w... More

Located in the downtown area of Nancy, the project site is installed nearby several city faculties. Construction of the project allows now all doctoral students to be concentrated in a single building. The project, urban by its position in the city, must resolve the paradox of being visible both by the strength and the quality of its presence, but discreet in its volumes and materials. We sought to strike a balance between the presence of a university building and the careful respect of the neighborhood.   The project thus offers an extremely unitary architectural figure, in direct extension of the dimensions of the neighboring buildings. The materials echo the site's industrial past while being local. Concrete, brick, wood and zinc... More

Xiao Jing Wan is a coastal urban development located to the east of Shenzhen. Foster + Partners has designed a mixed-use development consisting of a hotel, clubhouse, retail and residential components in the region, also including a 55,000 square-metre university campus for China Resources Group. Situated astride a hill, with exceptional views towards the South China Sea, the management training institute accommodates 500 students, with residential facilities for up to 300 students and 35 staff.   Five teaching buildings and the innovation centre flank the central boulevard at the crest of the hill, which terminates with the main auditorium building, containing the main lecture theatre for 580 people and other meeting rooms. The libr... More

The new park facilitates the urbanistic integration of the university building, a freestanding object in a heterogeneous urban context. As envisioned in the master plan, the park acts as the entry foyer of the Polyfeld district and is a space of major relevance to the neighbourhood. At the same time,it representsthe university’s main gathering area. Within this dual role, the park achieves autonomy through a change in leveltoward its surroundings and a unique atmosphere, distinctivelyavoiding appropriation by the university as a front yard.   A compact ribbon of trees encircling the space, flanked by a retaining wall toward the side of the train tracks, ensures the park’s spatial independence. This frameof trees reinforce... More

The citadel is a pentagonal defensive fort, commissioned by Henri IV and built by Jean Errard de Bar-le-Duc at the beginning of the 17th century. It occupies a key area of the city of Amiens, on the northern bank of the river Somme, between the historic city centre and the northern quarters. Occupied by the army, who forbade public access until 1993, it was the subject of an architectural competition in 2010. The idea was to restore the fort and give it a place at the heart of city life by installing a university campus for 4,000 students (part of l’Université de Picardie Jules-Verne [UPJV]), at the centre of a vast new public space.   The conversion and re-opening of the citadel, the restoration of its three historic ga... More

Le James of McGill University located outside the formal campus, is a bookstore designed as an extension of the downtown Montreal campus. The bookstore is a fully connected campus space, a catalyst between the university and the city of Montreal. It becomes a place for exchange and academic pride that allows students to appropriate the site.   Located on two levels (ground floor and basement), the bookstore focusses its attention on a large central staircase. This element is inspired by the traditional exterior stairs of the McGill university buildings that students have become accustomed to occupying. This striking element serves both as a circulation tool and as a visual link. Its strategic location and generous size allow a great... More

A property developer Golden Land contacted Onion when they were planning to build a new commercial mall, partially opened 24 hours a day, called Samyan Mitrtown on Rama IV Road next to Chulalongkorn University. Golden Land also wished to give something back to the society in terms of space for working and reading, free of charge and open 24 hours a day. This space would be located on the second floor of Samyan Mitrtown commercial mall. The brief that we created is to design a 500-seat reading and working space that opened 24-hour a day, free of charge, for the general public. Samyan Co-op (co-operative) is a non-profit organization for education that exists in a commercial mall. Onion started the project by studying existing places that h... More