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