Payette wraps Boston academic building in ribbons of stainless steel

Nov 13, 2024

Architecture studio Payette has completed an urban building at Northeastern University called EXP, which features a rooftop garden and facades wrapped in a "solar veil" made of metal strips.

Located on a former brownfield site, the EXP building is the latest addition to a science and engineering precinct on the university's campus.

The precinct sits between two Boston neighbourhoods, Roxbury and The Fenway. Other structures there include a rounded building called the Interdisciplinary Science + Engineering Complex (ISEC for short) and a pedestrian bridge called PedX, both designed by local firm Payette. All are designed to "activate campus life."

For the new project, the studio conceived an eight-storey structure with an exterior wrapped in ribbons of stainless steel, which help mitigate heat gain while adding an expressive look to the educational building.

"These continuous ribbons pinwheel around the building, responding to both the solar exposure and the programme, tapering open and closed to express varying levels of solid and transparent screening," the team said.

The exterior articulation also responds to the nearby ISEC building, which is partly wrapped in bronze fins.

Within the 357,000-square-foot (33,166 square metres) EXP facility, one finds a mix of educational and research spaces, which radiate outward from a central core. Writing desks and offices are arrayed along the perimeter of the plan.

The lower portion of the building – envisioned as a "hive of activity" – contains flexible classrooms, maker spaces and a cafe. A two-storey robotics space occupies a prominent corner spot, helping define the street edge while putting research on display.

The upper levels of the facility accommodate advanced research in a wide range of areas, including computation, data science, drug discovery, autonomous vehicles, drones and humanoid robots.

The building's top floor encompasses event space and a faculty commons area, along with a rooftop garden offering sweeping views of the city.

Designed to achieve LEED Platinum certification from the US Green Building Council, the facility has a range of sustainability features, including ample daylight, low-flow plumbing fixtures and a rainwater reuse system.

The exterior "solar veil" and triple glazing help form a high-performance envelope. The building also has a high-performance heating and cooling system that includes chilled beams and a heat-recovery system.

Given the laboratory spaces, the building also has special fume hoods to help ventilate the air while reducing energy usage.

"The project incorporates the largest installation in the world of filtered fume hoods – along with high-performance, low-flow hoods – to significantly reduce the air flow requirements in what otherwise would have been a very ventilation-intensive programme," the team said.

According to Payette, the building is expected to consume 78 per cent less energy than a typical research building.

Other university buildings in Boston include a fossil-fuel-free "vertical campus" at Boston University by KPMB Architects that consists of irregularly stacked boxes and a large structure at Harvard University by Behnisch Architekten that is wrapped in the "world's first hydroformed stainless-steel screen".

The photography is by Robert Benson.

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