| Our
New Home
On July 12, 2002, the board of trustees approved schematic designs
for the new home of the Stuckeman Family Building for the School
of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. The
design says a lot
about how we feel about Landscape Architecture and its place on
campus. The new building causes us to ask how we might use the
opportunity
to revise our program's image.
If we had been trying to run a "stealth"
program for the last XX years we could hardly have chosen better
locations than to be hidden from view on the top floor of Sackett
and then the second and third floors of the Engineering Units. And
it has probably been wise to be a little reticent about revealing
our prime locations close to College Avenue—but at
some stage we must turn to bigger issues than our own comfort. You
all know the many important, influential—and different
perspectives with which your own practice of landscape architecture
addresses the world. It's timely for us at Penn State to demonstrate
the breadth and depth of those contributions with others, and further
build the vital role we play in the wise stewardship of the landscape.
The new building will be open—gallery
and office spaces open onto an atrium that is one of the main pedestrian
"streets" on campus. The studio space core of the building
is conceived as a ribbon connecting two high-ceiling work-space
floors and a linking mezzanine of review and gallery spaces. The
studios also open to |
 |
Faculty
Office Wing and East Facade
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the outside via a skin designed for optimum daylighting-and
at night the ghostly figures of late-night designers silhouetted
in the windows becomes our active billboard for the profession.
The Stuckeman Family Building will also be Penn
State's first
LEED-rated building. The auditing process is already in progress
and we are presently on the cusp between achieving the Silver and
Gold ratings-so the new building will be exemplary of an holistic
view of how we as designers respond to a multitude of environmental,
economic, and energy constraints.
While we will be further from the Diner and its
sticky buns, we will be much closer to our colleagues among the
other arts disciplines, open to their ideas and proclaiming our
intention not just to shape the world but to do so with sensitivity
to the widest range of cultural and artistic values so that we maximize
quality of life.
Hold those thoughts while we proceed through detail design, but
do give some more thought to the theme of openness.
 
 
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