Industry News

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s new National Center for Supercomputing Applications Advanced Computation Building Addition was recently completed by Holabird & Root of Chicago. The 17,000-sf facility features a 90 x 90-ft column-free space that can accommodate continually changing arrangements of hardware. The construction of the exterior allows the room to expand incrementally without the addition of walls or columns inside the space, while operating at full capacity.

Kyonggi University has selected Cannon Design of Boston to design its new 50,000-sf Teleconferencing Auditorium, a 1,300-seat facility that will serve as both the campus hub for the information technology infrastructure and as an auditorium for special events. The “green” building will be submerged into landscaped terraces to increase energy efficiency, and will be constructed of recycled materials and use energy captured by solar collectors mounted on adjacent buildings and within the garden landscape.

 Meredith College has a new $20 million, 80,000-sf collaborative science building under construction. Designed by BJLAS Architecture and built by Rogers Builders of Charlotte, N.C., the facility will promote interaction by bringing together the various science subspecialties, rather than isolating them by floor. The most expensive lab space -- that used by the departments of chemistry and biology -- will be grouped together. Four to six students will work together at lab "islands." Small group study alcoves will be located throughout the structure.

The University of Texas at San Antonio is designing a new four-story academic building—Academic Building III—a 190,000-sf facility for the Department of English, Classics and Philosophy; the College of Education and Human Development; and the Department of Communications. The proposed $53-million structure will house multipurpose classrooms, lecture halls, teaching labs, and administrative offices.

Howard University dedicated its new $27-million Louis Stokes Health Sciences Library in mid-November 2001. Washington, D.C.-based Hillier designed the four-story, 80,000-sf library, which can seat up to 615 people. The facility can accommodate as many as 400,000 volumes, periodicals, and digitally formatted material. The library features a telemedicine room, where students can make diagnoses from their workstations.