Last week, CO celebrated the grand opening of the new lobby for the UCLA La Kretz Botany Building. The reimagined lobby space creates sight lines to the adjacent garden and brings to life a mosaic design from the building’s original architect, Paul Williams.The full renovation project will consolidate much of the EEB department within the Botany Building and make departmental research and teaching visible to the greater UCLA community.
Tata Hall for the Sciences is a new state of the art research and teaching laboratory at UC San Diego. Together with our engineers, CO Architects developed energy conservation strategies to reduce the building’s overall energy consumption. As laboratories are one of the most energy intensive building types – and are operational 24 hours a day – efficiencies can yield huge reductions in the building’s carbon footprint.
As we strive to enhance our work and enable the exploration of novel design solutions, the challenges presented by different projects can sometimes extend beyond the core capabilities of our authoring tools. Here is a look at some of the ways we are exploring a do-it-yourself approach to digital tool development.
Essential to the success of the contemporary medical school is its facility’s ability to adapt to changes in medical curriculum and pedagogy, and for the program spaces to support multiple functions. Innovative solutions to traditional medical education space planning will result in a building able to flex to various scaled activities in a single space. Designing for change will create a facility that is durable, enduring and sustainable, demonstrating a prudent use of an institution’s physical, financial and human resources.
The Health Education Building at the University of Kansas Medical Center is a new academic medical and health sciences training facility that creates literal and figurative connections at all scales: across Kansas and the KU campuses, among schools and curricula, between the past and present, and most importantly, between people.
Contemporary research engages teams of researchers working together to solve complex problems. Today’s laboratory facilities bring different scientific disciplines under one roof to create opportunities for collaboration and cross-disciplinary discovery. Yet physical laboratory space requirements often vary greatly among the disciplines, resulting in unique challenges in laboratory planning and programming.
As designers we are constantly searching for inspiration to motivate our projects. Learn how CO Architects used a building’s historical characteristics as influence for modern details in this journal entry from Rachel Jordan.
