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College Employees Value Campus Environment, 'Chronicle' Survey Finds
When a Chronicle survey asked college employees what they value about their jobs, they put the physical environment in which they work at the top of the list. (Chronicle photograph of Washington & Lee U.)
Rise in Tornadoes, Floods Poses Risk to Colleges
What if the sort of extreme weather that has left the University of Iowa inundated in floodwaters is not a freak event? What if it is a sign of things to come? (Photograph by AP Images)
Art & Architecture Renovations Near Completion at Yale U.
Paul Rudolph's 1963 Brutalist icon is getting a makeover, plus an addition by Charles Gwathmey.
Guest Blogger: Marc Mayerson
Like swashbuckling movie heroes, facilities planners take on herculean tasks.
Other News
Campus Planners Discuss Challenges in Attaining Sustainability
Analyzing How Students Choose Colleges Is Key Topic at Meeting of Planners
Specialized Developers Helping More Colleges to Meet Housing Needs
New campus buildings
Multimedia
A Green Building as a Billboard for Science
(A 2006 Chronicle video)
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About Buildings & Grounds
Buildings & Grounds is written by Scott Carlson (left) and Lawrence Biemiller (right). Scott Carlson writes about architecture, facilties, energy, and sustainability, among other topics. Lawrence Biemiller writes about architecture and facilities and contributes to Notes from Academe. What's happening on your campus? Let us know.
At UCLA, Rafael Viñoly Makes Inventive Use of Air Space on a Tight Plot
The California NanoSystems Institute at the U. of California at Los Angeles, designed by Rafael Viñoly, has crisscrossing ramps that provide opportunities for meetings and chance encounters. (U. of California at Los Angeles image)
Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for The Los Angeles Times, says that Rafael Viñoly’s new building for the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles is “one of the most compelling architectural set pieces in all of Los Angeles” — mainly for the way it uses a tricky site.
Mr. Hawthorne points out that UCLA is by far the most densely built of all the UC campuses — it has the smallest land area and the most square footage in buildings. Mr. Viñoly’s challenge was to create a space that would encourage collaboration and interaction while maintaining areas for much-coveted parking — all on a site next to a steep hill.
Mr. Viñoly could have designed a tower, which would have been efficient in its use of land space, but would have never fit in with other buildings on campus.
“What you want instead for this kind of project, Viñoly argues, is an open horizontal form where scientists have to walk along wide corridors and through courtyards during a typical day, running into colleagues by chance and exchanging ideas,” Mr. Hawthorne writes. “It is hardly a new principle: Louis Kahn’s stunning Salk Institute in La Jolla, finished in 1965, helped make that kind of lab architecture popular.
“At UCLA, though, a low-lying, earth-hugging building with a Salk-style courtyard was simply impossible: The site wouldn’t allow it. So Viñoly did the next best thing: He took three floors of lab space and proposed building them as a stand-alone wing at the back of the site, where they are suspended over the top of the parking structure. Then he connected that three-story wing to the main building with a series of crisscrossing ramps, creating a dramatic, bottomless courtyard that provides the opportunity for the chance meetings that both Viñoly and his client were looking for. The result is a horizontal building by highly unusual, almost preposterous means — a building that is roughly three times as wide in the air as where it meets the ground.”
Scott Carlson | Tuesday April 29, 2008 | Permalink | Contact usComments
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Next: Don't Be So Quick to Knock Down Modernist Architecture
That’s a gorgeous photograph — in the abstract — but given the subject-matter, why didn’t Viñoly have the “wings” suggest carbon nanotubes, rather than food-court bridges over a Chicago expressway? Or am I blinded by the angle and the light of this artful picture?
— S. Britchky Apr 29, 12:59 PM #