SUNY at Albany Unveils Stone-Like Design for Business School

Perkins + Will designed a new business-school building for the State U. of New York at Albany. (Perkins + Will rendering)

Starting this summer, a 96,000-square-foot business-school building inspired by Edward Durell Stone will go up in front of one of Stone’s 1960s masterpieces, the State University of New York at Albany. The design, by Perkins + Will, was unveiled yesterday by university officials and New York politicians.

The $64-million building will be constructed alongside the entry plaza that fronts Stone’s vast assemblage of buildings, which the university refers to as the “academic podium” and which stretches the length of more than five football fields. Opposite the construction site is University Hall, a 2006 building by Gwathmey Siegel Associates that is set at an angle to Stone’s and answers it with curving, mirror-clad walls.

The Perkins + Will design is much more in keeping with Stone’s. The Albany Times-Union describes it as “a complicated structure of soaring vertical columns that includes, among other features, a pool with fountains and a 250-foot carillon tower.” Rob Goodwin, a Perkins + Will principal, told the newspaper that the firm solved the challenge of building so close to Stone’s structure by infusing the new design with “the DNA of the podium,” yet allowing it to acquire a personality of its own.

Watch a 2007 audio slideshow about Stone’s campus here.

Skylights will illuminate the new building’s interior.