Like the athletes it serves, the collegiate center draws life from breathing, facilitating air movement through natural ventilation while creating a light-filled campus icon. Both in materiality and transparency, the building nods to the surrounding hilly and wooded landscape.
A Campus Anchor and Pedestrian Hub
The structure is set into the ground to reduce the project scale, accentuating the tower while creating a meaningful iconic element for the college. The main hall gathering space is a main central control point for the building where both the community and campus enter.
Beneath the central tower a vibrant central public space flows from inside to out, linking to campus, and overlooking new and future athletics fields, while establishing a backbone framework for future expansions.
Letting it Breathe
The field house uses natural ventilation powered by the stack effect of warm air rising to expel warmer hotter air out of the higher louvers in the core tower with minimum mechanical means as cooler air is drawn into the building through lower louvers on the prevailing wind side of the building. The height of the tower allows for differential air pressure to create the airflow and takes advantage of higher wind speeds at the height of the louvers – much like a chimney.
