INSTITUTE FOR DATA SCIENCES

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Wegmans Hall is the signature focus of the University of Rochester’s Strategic Plan to foreground and leverage information technology in a new educational model forcross-disciplinary research and innovation. The project re-envisions avehicular-based Science & Engineering Quad by eliminating roadways, parkingand service areas and transforming it into a pedestrian and bicycle-orientedcampus landscape. Designed to LEED Silver standards, the program providesfaculty and students offices, flexible labs, a 350 seat auditorium, and the Goergen Institute for Data Science.

The building massing gestures two campus geometries, one that addresses the University’s Science & Engineering Quad and the other that offers a new public face to the Genesee River, uniting these in a simple “broken” rectilinear form. The building reinterprets the University’s material standards of brick and limestone through the use of custom-molded brick and vertical precast concrete panels. The brick envelope is conceived of as a continuously wrapped skin with narrow and wide punched windows that express the binary number system’s 0 and 1 that are fundamental to encoding data. Internally, collaboration spaces are integrated into a generous public circulation sequence, winding their way around the building perimeter and culminating at a double-height sky lit public lab space that overlooks the Quad and is linked by a bridge to neighboring Hopeman Hall. Along this public circulation, large vertical glazed bays on the south, east, and west facades are designed to “breakthrough” the hung masonry envelope to express multi-story collaboration zones and shared overlooks that admit natural light deep into the building interior.

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RECOGNITION

2020 AIA NY State Institutional Design Excellence Award
2017 Brick Industry Gold Award

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PROJECT DATA

Date: 2017
Status: Completed
Client: University of Rochester
Location: Rochester, NY
Design Team:
Frano Violich, FAIA; Managing Principal
Sheila Kennedy, FAIA; Principal Consulting on Design
Alex Shelly, AIA; Project Architect/ Project Manager
Shawna Meyer, AIA, LEED AP; Project Architect
Ben Widger, Robert White, Belinda Valenti, Diana Tomova, Kyle Altman, Daniel Sebaldt, Allan Delesantro, Blair Ekleberry, Alex Gormley
Architect: Kennedy & Violich Architecture, Ltd.
Structural Engineer: BuroHappold Engineering
MEP & Envelope: IBC Engineering
Civil Engineer: T.Y. Lin
Contractor: Welliver
Code Consultant: Jensen Hughes Associates Inc.