Page 28 - College Planning & Management, September 2018

AT FIRST SIGHT
contribute to Stanford’s teaching mission as it does to leadership in energy efficiency and environmental responsibility.”
A Nod to History at UMass Amherst
Likewise, advanced materials and context were by no means mutually exclusive in the design of another building envelope: that of the John W. Olver Design Building at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In other words, the UMass Amherst building also
expressed the institution and the history and natural setting of its environs.
As Andrea Leers, principal of architect Leers Weinzapfel Associates, explains,
the concept of the building envelope there “is a light ‘metal jacket’ of vertical panels and windows that create a striated texture inspired by the forests and tobacco barns of the region. The panel system allows a natural variation in window openings with the largest expanses at the studios facing north and the most protected walls at the offices on the south.”
It is an exterior design response that weaves nature, history, and university together. As Leers explains, “the references to natural woodland materials wrapping a modulated series of interior spaces create
a relaxed and informal workshop identity suitable to the Design Building’s role on the campus.” On another point, “The vertical syncopated pattern of windows is meant
to evoke the imagery of regional forests and hark back to the 19th-century tobacco barn, an agrarian building type once com- mon to the area,” Leers says.
There is much more to the Olver enve- lope, whose high-insulation value, as Leers says, “plays a major role in the building’s performance.” She details components
of the envelope, including its advanced roof and window systems, and an above- grade exterior wall with a cladding system consisting of a high-performance, heavily insulated aluminum rain screen with an overall R-value of 31.3, noting that the
28 COLLEGE PLANNING & MANAGEMENT / SEPTEMBER 2018
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