Attempting to address one of the commuter college’s biggest challenges—creating place—the project was approached from the student experience out, letting educational functionality and interactivity drive its design. Creating community within a setting where students come and go directly from and to their car is often not a part of the learning experience. To achieve this, the “role” of public space was redefined, merging program with traditional circulation space while focusing on the broader student experience. The result of this effort is creating space for community—leveraging design to “slow down” the student experience by expanding the resources and people to which each student has access in this critical moment between car-classroom-car.

Leveraging a process that focused on creating community produced a new model for building programming that challenges the idea that all learning needs to reside within a classroom’s four walls. The design concept for this new building centered around what students and faculty need from a learning environment: flexible classrooms, abundant daylight, and dynamic gathering spaces to share ideas. The rigorous yet simple organization of program spaces intentionally brings together office and support spaces with classrooms, promoting student-teacher collaboration. Primary learning environments are located on the upper floors within five “building blocks” with a larger multifunction and public spaces anchoring the ground floor.