A common theme among the projects in this colleges and universities issue is that they were designed to instruct. And some have more to teach than others.
Take, for example, a pair of utility structures at Princeton designed by ZGF. Geo-exchange may not be as familiar a term as geothermal, but one of the oldest universities in the country is investing heavily in the not-so-new but still-underutilized technology. The TIGER building, and the smaller CUB, constitute the “exchange” component of the system—taking heat out of campus buildings in the summer and storing it in the ground for reuse in winter. The serpentine network of colorful pipes transferring the energy has been put on display for passersby to see, and several other schools in the Northeast and elsewhere are following Princeton’s lead.
The CoARCH Pavilion at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln is another example. “The pedagogical building is not just one within which teaching and learning happens,” says Nader Tehrani, whose firm, NADAAA, designed that structure with HDR as a lesson in mass-timber construction for the architecture students who will be designing inside its studio spaces. “The building itself has a didactic function.”
The CoARCH Pavilion is one of three mass-timber buildings on college campuses we feature in these pages. Additions by Studio Gang at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, this month’s cover, and by Lake | Flato at Trinity University in San Antonio also use cross-laminated timber, the still-evolving construction system that architects are turning to more and more for its low embodied carbon, structural strength, speed of assembly, and almost complete elimination of the need for finishes. While these projects make up a hefty share of the university buildings in this issue, only about 1 percent of new construction across the U.S. employs mass timber.
Colleges and universities are usually ahead of the curve—and make for some of the most enlightened clients. Institutions operating for a hundred or more years, many with acres and acres of land, are willing to bear the up-front costs for sometimes new and innovative ways of building. This long-term thinking comes with many benefits—another lesson for the rest of us.
