When erecting a new student commons between historic Hutchins Hall and another academic building at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor, designers discovered that the building code required a 2-hour fire-rated barrier. However, the 80-year-old Hutchins Hall façade was adorned with aged limestone and historic stained glass windows. In order to transform the existing wall into a fire-rated assembly, the building team needed to remove the stained glass and limestone, install custom designed Safti SuperLite II-XL 120 glazing and EZ frames, then painstakingly re-assemble the stained glass and limestone. “The first step was to carefully remove the existing stained glass window

The University of Rochester, in Rochester, N.Y., began accepting students to its new Goergen Institute of Data Science program in fall 2015, and two years later the school opened the doors to an ambitious new facility to house the effort.The building features a creative façade design by Kennedy & Violich Architects (KVA) that plays with the theme of a data-centric mission, offering a “coded” indicator of the work going on within its walls. At the same time, it also ties this very modern building to the larger campus, with its roots back to the 1930s.The campus is the university’s third home and was originally built as its College for Men in 1930. Its oldest buildings fe

On the campus side, light-colored brick, along with concrete, predominates, drawing on the limestone shades of the school’s oldest structures. The town side, however, features brick in deep red tones. For this building, New York City-based Weiss/Manfredi brought those downtown hues onto campus, combining millennia-old masonry technology with cutting-edge architecture to create a high-performance structure that’s also become a teaching tool.Aiming for LEED Platinum certification, Weiss/Manfredi’s architects selected brick that was produced locally. And they got their own lessons in how brick is fired and in how its color can shift based on how it’s produced from suppli

By using non-traditional materials, like undulating coiled wire fabric walls and ceiling treatments, the new iSuite boasts an impeccable, award-winning design. Designed by Page, the former metal foundry turned iSuite includes a cyber range, collaborative hub and a maker space. Working with the college directly, the facility was designed using Page’s 3D printers and a student-created virtual reality model, developing a half-scale mockup to demonstrate that inverting the metal fabric would, in fact, be successful.“We’ve seen metal fabric draped as a catenary before, but this is the first time someone has used Fabricoil in the ‘wrong direction,’” says Lou Kru