George Brown College Waterfront Campus
“There have been a lot of condos built on the lake shore over the past couple of decades, but this may be the first purpose-built facility coming to Toronto’s waterfront at which citizens will be able to (inexpensively) get their teeth cleaned”.
George Brown College in Toronto has commisioned  Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects in collaboration with Stantec Architecture to design its new Urban Health Sciences Campus – aiming for LEED Gold on the waterfront building.
I was initially drawn to the renderings – which are sick, by the way – but the building seems to hold a lot of potential. Picking up on what could be considered a typical wharf building typology, the campus extends in a linear fashion towards Lake Ontario – connecting to a new waterfront park. A ‘public’ podium adresses the waterfront while ‘Health Sciences’ programs occupy the upper levels and the street-side volume, allowing the building to function both as a learning environment and a social hub.
The varying programs – namely the public VS private – are connected via a vertical circulation space that is meant to both connect the ground-plane to the building’s public green roofs, while also providing informal interior spaces for cross-discipline interaction between students, faculty, and visitors. See the section below.
I’d be really interest to see how the connection under the street to the second building is made – if it somehow captures the light and open qualities shown in these renderings, or if its a tunnel…
.:images+info->via Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects
Posted: March 11th, 2010
at 4:51am by orangemenace
Tagged with illustration, school, architecture
Categories: architecture
Comments: 5 comments
WEISS / MANFREDI: Diana Center
Barnard College’s Diana Center, a 98,000 SF multipurpose arts building designed by Weiss / Manfredi, has recently opened for use. The competition-winning design aims to transform the project from simply an art facility into a “social nexus”, creating new spaces for interaction and collaboration between the building’s users.
The 7-storey structure includes architecture and painting studios, a 500-seat performance space, black box theatre, cafe, dining room, reading room, classrooms, and exhibition galleries – all contained within facade of 1,154 clear and color-integral glass panels, intended to reference the brick and terra cotta used  in the surrounding neighborhood.
The project’s most striking feature is a diagonal void carved through the building, creating double-heigh glass atria that connect the building’s interior with the surrounding campus and the city beyond – while also creating informal spaces for the interaction and collaboration mentioned above.
The public-space volume twisting out from the main structure, creating views and social interaction, etc, actually reminds me of Steven Holl’s Linked Hybrid (oddly enough).
::info + images provided by WEISS / MANFREDI::
Posted: February 25th, 2010
at 11:48am by orangemenace
Tagged with green, school, weiss/manfredi, NYC
Categories: architecture,green arch
Comments: 5 comments