It’s an urban oasis, an indoor landscape, and an effective solution to brand a university campus otherwise lost in the chaos of downtown Toronto. Designed by Snøhetta in collaboration with local firm Zeidler Partnership Architects, Ryerson University’s new Student Learning Centre is an audacious bid to redefine the concept of an inner-city student commons. “The program is amazingly open,” says project architect Michael Cotton, of Snøhetta’s New York office. “It’s almost like a 10-story lobby. Sometimes we call it a library without books.”
The City College of New York (CCNY) is a bit like an academic Acropolis. Situated in Upper Manhattan on one of the island’s highest points, its collection of early 20th-century neo-Gothic buildings, by George B. Post—and more recent additions by architects that include Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Rafael Viñoly—sit high above the surrounding neighborhood of townhouses and low-scale apartment buildings.
In developing the ceramic facade for a revamped studio-art wing for Macalester College’s Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center, the architects at Minneapolis-based firm HGA started to feel as if they had enrolled in an art class of their own.
For an academic center, a former RECORD Vanguard architect revives a centuries-old building method to create a new archetype. There is a common thread that runs through all of Studio Gang’s work.
Westlake Reed Leskosky raises the roof in its overhaul of a music building by Minoru Yamasaki. Visitors to Oberlin College in rural northern Ohio might be surprised by the caliber of architecture that graces its nearly 500-acre campus.
An ecologically diverse former plantation becomes an outdoor classroom. In 1962, John Henry Dick underwent what some call a hunter's conversion. That year, Dick'a product of New York high society, with a proclivity for ornithology, big game, and porkpie hats'found himself on a safari face-to-face with a Bengal tiger.
A beloved '60s dormitory—once the tallest building in Arizona—was adapted to the needs of today's plugged-in students Manzanita Hall makes a striking statement on the northern edge of the Arizona State University, Tempe, campus, across from the Sun Devil Stadium and blocks from the downtown.