Earlier this year, the University of Maryland, College Park celebrated the opening of a new building on its campus. The Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering is home to the university’s top ranked Department of Computer Science and its renowned Institute for Advanced Computer Studies.
Set among the university’s classic Neo-Georgian architecture, the new building provides space for nationally recognized centers of interdisciplinary research in cybersecurity, data science, computational biology, machine learning and other fast-growing tech fields, and the building’s six floors of specialized labs, classrooms and offices support “groundbreaking research in virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, robotics, computer vision, algorithms and programming languages and systems.”
“The 215,600 sq. ft. facility acts as a catalyst for bringing people together for education, research and discovery. The building gestures to campus traditions; brick finishes on the auditorium and landscape walls evoke the University’s Neo-Georgian heritage, and the building’s curved shape nestles within the orthogonal site plan,” notes the project description.
Designed by HDR, the Brendan Iribe Center serves as a “gateway between academia in one direction and the economic development engine of the city of College Park’s Discovery District in the other.”
The new building will host everything from job fairs to hack-a-thons, alongside a vibrant daily student life full of classroom presentations, workshops and casual interactions.
At the beginning of the project, HDR identified three main stakeholders all considered the ‘client’ – the computer science department, the leadership at the University of Maryland, and Brendan Iribe, an entrepreneur and primary donor for the project.
“Brendan went to school at Maryland for almost a semester and a half, then left school to become an entrepreneur,” said Brian Kowalchuk, global director of design at HDR, in an officeinsight interview. “He purchased the rights to the Oculus Rift goggle tech, and became very successful as a result. After he had left, he was riding around the campus in a golf cart with the university president, and voiced an interest in contributing to making a change to the campus buildings. He was interested in changing how the connection to the business world happens for students.”
A Neo-Georgian Tech Aesthetic
“Brendan wanted the new building to be less a computer science building, and more a blended space for how computers enter and interact in our world…how they fit together and connect to all of the university’s curriculums.”
A major goal for the new building was to create a space where things are invented and built and made, and where the making of things can be showcased. A place where the tools and processes used to make things, and the maker spaces themselves, are on display.
“Also important to them and to us was the idea that everyone from the first-year student to grad students, to professors and to outside business users – are all learning together,” said Mr. Kowalchuk. “All of that learning happens in different ways, and we need different spaces for each of those learning types to happen.”
“Everybody who walks or drives past on the campus can see the maker spaces, can see things actually being made, inside. Visibility and the use of glass was critical to the design because we wanted to create something where you could actively see education and learning taking place. The notion of the building and also the challenge of it was to express what happens inside it, and to embody the people inside it.”
A balance of Neo-Georgian brick and glass achieves architectural consistency on the campus, while providing a window of intrigue into the innerworkings of people and technology. Connecting the new building to the existing language of the larger university campus was a key challenge to the project, noted Mr. Kowalchuk.
“Brendan wanted it to be right next to the Gatehouse of the university – a cornerstone of the entire university, and an emblem of a new beginning of the university’s curriculums. However, the university has a very traditional campus, with a very specific Neo-Georgian architectural aesthetic consistent throughout.”
A Layered Maker Space Experience
Inside the new Brendan Iribe Center, students, faculty, and outside business community partners have access to a multi-layered 5300-square foot maker space experience. The maker space is composed of three distinct types of spaces, each intended for different maker experiences.
“In order to develop these different maker spaces, we first had to have a discussion of what a maker space is,” said Kowalchuk. “Once we got to an agreement on what users would be doing in the maker spacers, we were able to start thinking about scale, technology available, and how open or closed they are to the rest of the building.”
The first maker space is the largest – an open double-height space on the ground level of the building, intended for more open, collaborative pursuits.
“It’s a large open garage space that is super visible, yet educational at the same time,” Mr. Kowalchuk said. “It’s a multi-discipline space – things like drones can be flown in there, and large pieces of equipment can be driven into the space. Technology that engineers are working with can be supported, alongside movie-making projects from Humanities students. They wanted kids to be peeking their heads into this big space and asking questions.”
The second and third types of maker spaces are located on the building’s upper levels. Smaller than the ground floor space, the second maker space type is a dynamic environment that can expand and contract to suit the needs of small, medium and large groups.
“These maker spaces are geared toward smaller interdepartmental maker projects and functions.”
Lastly, students, faculty and outside business partners can access individual maker spaces that offer more privacy and can be booked for a couple weeks or for several months depending on the project.
“We wanted to provide different levels of visibility, security and square footage, to give them flexibility suiting their needs.”
Holistic Learning for Students and Staff
“We wanted to create a space that would engage every student all the time,” said Mr. Kowalchuk. “If you’re educating 1000 students, only half of those students might be engaged directly in a classroom. We want to enable the school to engage at all levels of the college experience.”
A double-height ground floor holds the lobby – a key spot containing several functional spaces: an open learning student center/lounge, a café dining experience located next to a large open maker space, the entrance to a 350-person formal auditorium, and a handsome set of teaching bleachers. Seating areas, digital displays, and a sculptural stair.
“The bleachers are a super versatile teaching space. They’re situated under an overhang created by the stair, and it’s intended to be a more open, public environment where almost 150 students can gather together around a series of platforms. It’s often more focused toward interactions with the outside business community, and can be used by other university staff for gatherings of all kinds, such as a cocktail hour for funding – a place for the university at large to host events throughout the day and into the evening.”
The upper floors each have a center core – an atrium space rising up through the building, with classrooms and other learning environments centered around it. Each floor also has a student help desk.
“How technology, presentation ability, acoustics, visibility, and furnishings in each of the spaces is quite different from each other,” said Mr. Kowalchuk. “We also thought about what to call each space – how to brand them.”
Outdoors, students and faculty can walk through, hang out and roam freely through multiple plazas, lawn spaces and green roofs, including a garden located off the second level and a large rooftop garden and patio space on the top floor.
“More than a corporate amenity space, elements like rooftop patios and gardens need to be included in educational spaces, too.”
Hackathon Inspo
In getting to know his client, Mr. Kowalchuk attended a hackathon event called Bitcamp, where Brendan Iribe was serving as keynote speaker.
“I was so inspired by that hackathon environment. It was held at a gymnasium, where students camp out and work around the clock for 48 hours to problem solve and create. The hackathon ideal – of allowing freedom, expression and play to flourish. It provided me with an example of how the best of video game culture can be applied to learning and to a university environment. There’s a lot of freedom to create in that space. So we took inspiration from that to give the school an ability to embrace and cultivate students from every background, including students who learn differently and students with differing perspectives, strengths and goals. We created a space that embraces students’ differences as opposed to making the students conform to the school.”
In that quest to create the hackathon ideal, HDR worked hard to understand who their client was, balancing multiple stakeholders with differing views on what the new building can and should be.
“It was quite challenging to work with all the constituents and to pull it all off,” said Mr. Kowalchuk. “It was a lot of fun, but also very challenging to understanding who our client was. In the end, it was helpful to think of the student as our client, to develop and inform everything we did around them.”
The university staff certainly seem to feel the new building is a good addition to the campus. In a press announcement, Amitabh Varshney, professor of computer science and dean of the university’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences, said, “This is one of the most innovative facilities at any university. What is so remarkable is not just the beautiful space and the advanced equipment, but the way the building was designed. It is truly a collaborative place where people will work together to experiment and invent technologies that will lead us into the future.”
The University of Maryland, College Park has set itself and its students up for a bright future, supported by impactful architecture that will help them to think and create freely, mapping out a path forward for how we interact with technology in the future.
