Latest Reports

What the university needs: A spacious, modern science building, with an additional 5,000 sf. What the university has: An old, dark, rather cramped classroom building, built for a different era in education, with inadequate systems, and no room to expand. It’s a common problem on university campuses, and in many cases solving it requires flexibility, creativity, and patience. At the University of Pittsburgh, Howard Skoke, AIA, of EwingCole Architects and Engineers and the university’s own Ilona Beresford worked together on a six-month master plan to devise a $65 million modernization. The project, scheduled to begin construction in May 2019, will open the building to new uses and adapt its systems for health and efficiency. At the same time, it will preserve a historic exterior and cost far less than a new building.

Colby-Sawyer College’s new Center for Arts + Design provides 24/7 access to safe, well-ventilated studio and support space for ceramics, sculpture, graphic design, photography, drawing, printmaking, painting, and sculpture; a black box theater; a fine art gallery with views of Mount Kearsarge; an outdoor sculpture garden; and offices for faculty. The Bill and Sonja Davidow '56 Fine Art Gallery offers a range of national and international museum-quality exhibitions in a variety of media, as well as expanded opportunities for students and professional artists.

At its new West Campus, Yale University is incrementally repurposing and renovating a former corporate pharmaceutical manufacturing facility for new interdisciplinary programs, including the Energy Sciences Institute (ESI) and Yale West Campus Materials Characterization Core (MCC).

The Greer Environmental Sciences Center at Virginia Wesleyan University is the institution’s response to a nearly 100 percent enrollment increase in their environmental sciences and biology department over five years. Located near the Chesapeake Bay, in Virginia Beach, the new 40,000-sf academic science building expands the university’s existing facilities to increase collaboration between science disciplines and regional partners, leveraging the school’s location at the mouth of the James River, where the 300-acre campus maintains a park-like setting with old growth forests and native wetlands in the middle of a dense, rapidly growing urban center.

Webster University’s new Browning Hall, Interdisciplinary Science Building, has transformed the university’s focus on science by tripling the number of science labs on campus. The 84,000-sf facility houses the departments of anthropology and sociology, biological sciences, international language and cultures, nurse anesthesia, nursing, and psychology, and the Institute for Human Rights & Humanitarian Studies.