At the center of the 9-story building is a series of public spaces designed to connect one of America's finest schools of design and architecture to the city's space, and to facilitate casual and scheduled student meetings, ideally leading to fruitful creative alliances and encouraging student collaboration. different specialties.
These informal "lounges" are kicked off by the first glazed floor of the building. Behind the V-shaped pillars that surround it, there is a kind of gallery where students can communicate without entering the building. Inside there is a lobby with a height of two floors; from there you can get to the exhibition space, a conference hall and an auditorium with 200 seats located on the underground level, which will be available to the townspeople during various events. But the main direction of movement from the lobby is upward, along a wide staircase, wrapped in a "mesh" of fiberglass and plastic. Narrowing as it rises - which visually increases its length - it leads to a double-height hall on the 4th floor, where an atrium extending to the very ceilings begins, intersected at different angles by bridges connecting different floors and spaces. Also, stairs and elevators lead upwards, some of which stop only on the second, sixth and ninth floors of the building in order to make students and teachers move more.
Most public spaces are visually connected to the urban space through a façade that can be seen from the inside, and the atrium is even marked on the outside by a section of glazing that resembles a rift or rupture. But natural light is not only available at key points in the building: it comes to 75% of the laboratories, classrooms and workshops that fill the floors of the building.
The façade deserves a special mention: the outside of the traditional glass curtain wall is covered with sheets of perforated steel, not only creating a dynamic vertical "landscape", but also protecting the interior of buildings from overheating in summer and preventing heat loss in winter. Thanks to this and other green elements of the project, Tom Maine expects to receive a gold (and possibly platinum) LEED certification for energy efficiency.
