Shop Talk: Millions for Computer Science, an Old Building for Law, a New Complex for Fashion

Carnegie Mellon’s two-building computer-science complex is under construction. (Carnegie Mellon image)

Computational Pittsburgh: The Henry L. Hillman Foundation is giving Carnegie Mellon University $10-million toward the cost of its new 209,000-square-foot computer-science complex, now under construction. The two-building complex, shoehorned into a difficult site by Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects, has already attracted a $20-million gift from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, according to the Pittsburgh Business Times. The $97-million complex is expected to open in 2009 and achieve a LEED silver rating. It will have 12 classrooms, about 310 offices, 32 labs, and 8,000 square feet of open project space. It will also house a Planetary Robotics Center and, for those still earthbound, a 150-space garage. Landscaping will be by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.

Fashionable New York: Lyn Rice Architects renovated four New York City buildings from the early 1900s to create the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center for the New School’s Parsons School of Design. The 32,800-square-foot complex at Fifth Avenue and 13th Street had its official opening yesterday, according to Women’s Wear Daily. The architects organized the complex around a double-height, skylight-covered quadrangle. The project provided exhibition spaces, an 89-seat auditorium, an orientation center for presentations to prospective students, a double-height meeting room carved out of a niche adjacent to a gallery, and a cantilevered, mezzanine-level meeting pod that overlooks the new quad. (Photograph by Noah Sheldon)

Theological Green Bay: Many architecture fans think highly of individual buildings and styles, but William Hynes, president of St. Norbert College, puts his campus on an altogether different level. “The entire campus, in Catholic theological terms, is a sacrament,” he told the Green Bay Press-Gazette, a newspaper in Green Bay, Wis. “It’s an intentional statement, and each new building that comes is a continuation of that intentional statement, some of which is beauty, some of which is symmetry, and all of which is care.” The comments come in an article about the college’s Main Hall, a red-brick Romanesque structure that dates from 1903. According to the Historic Campus Architecture Project, it was designed by William E. Reynolds as “a self-contained college.” It had classrooms, libraries, dormitory rooms, recreation areas, a kitchen and dining room, and an auditorium. (Wikipedia image)

Legalistic Knoxville: The City of Knoxville, Tenn., will lease an 1848 Greek Revival building that served more than 50 years as City Hall to Lincoln Memorial University, which plans to locate its new night law school there, reports