As was the case with Edmonton’s Royal Alberta Museum, the choices of artwork and historical material featured represent and reflect the energy and culture of the communities they serve. The Royal Alberta Museum (RAM), which celebrates the natural history and the human heritage of the province, embarked on a multi-year journey to thoughtfully reshape every facet of the museum, from the inside out.Architectural firm DIALOG, as part of a design build team with Ledcor and Lundholm Assocs., brought this new vision of RAM to life. An integrated team of award-winning architects, interior designers, landscape architects and structural, mechanical and electrical engineers were tasked

The new student center at the University of the District of Columbia was designed to create a sense of welcome to an urban campus that has long been seen as something of an afterthought. The four-year college has undertaken a major redesign to reposition itself in the dense, Van Ness neighborhood, and the student center’s entrance plaza certainly sets a stage for the upgrades that have taken place.Landscape architects with D.C.-based Lee and Assocs. took the lead on the plaza design—the student center was the work of CannonDesign, in collaboration with Marshall Moya Design. The entire project is one of only two student unions in the U.S. to earn leed Platinum.The university has t

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