Page 40 - College Planning & Management, July/August 2017

PATHS OF GLORY
It’s important to create spaces so that researchers will come out of their labs and interact with other people, the best interactions being between research associates who are in different groups but who have the same responsibilities.
Having said that, the IRC isn’t a hangout just for physics, chemistry and public health researchers and students. Many of the students who we’ve seen there since the building opened have no classes or tasks to perform in the IRC but are, instead, engineer- ing, business or mathematical sciences students from adjacent buildings who come over to enjoy snacks purchased elsewhere, sit on the IRC’s comfortable furniture and flip open their laptops. It
is easy to imagine administrators in physics, chemistry or public health asking themselves, why did we build that lobby for engi- neering students to come over and inhabit? Our response would be that students all over campus think the sciences rock, which has to be seen as a positive. One client of ours, for whom we’d designed an exciting new instructional greenhouse project that featured large glulam “trees” that supported the roof, told us that during construction, a student approached him to ask what the building was. The next semester, he found that student in his plant sciences class and learned he had switched his major.
Shared Goals
More often than not, we deal with campuses that need some measure of redevelopment or revitalization, and a key to many building projects’ success is in recognizing how to take advantage of the ways the campus is currently used, and to anticipate how it will be used in the future, whether working off an existing master plan or charged with producing one. The IRC could have had a more expan- sive footprint and been a shorter structure, but it was important to the university both to create a monumental building and to maintain space for a future row of smaller structures along Kenwood Avenue. At its present height, it is an iconic building that offers researchers and students in the upper floors a spectacular view of downtown Milwaukee, while keeping alive the original campus corridor.
And its presence is being felt throughout the campus because
of the way it’s being used by so many different students. Using the new building to keep the connection between the different areas of campus and creating a new palette of color and light as a template for future construction, the IRC has created a new brand for all of scien- tificresearchatUW-Milwaukee,andthecampusasawhole. CPM
Mark Corey (mcorey@flad.com) and David Black (dblack@flad. com) are principals with Flad Architects in Madison, WI.
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