DESIGN BUREAU
A. T. LEONARD & ASSOCIATES
Design Thinking
July 2013
Notes From the Bureau
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE · PLANNING
Landscape and architectural planners A.T. Leonard & Associates created a design that complemented DiMella Shaffer’s architecture at Fitchburg State. “The glass tower needed a large plaza to ground the structure and provide a scaled perspective to appreciate the architectural detail,” says principal Andrew T. Leonard.
You Are Here A small New England university reorients itself to the city
J
ust over the hill on the Fitchburg State University campus, a newly renovated student center has given the small Massachusetts school a fresh perspective. Once a disorienting eyesore, the new Hammond Campus Center by Boston-based architecture firm DiMella Shaffer is now the centerpiece of the university.
Shaping Landscapes
for Living and Learning
Landscape architecture and planning are more than a pretty picture. It is about creating places for people to pursue life, knowledge, and happiness. Our mission is to shape landscapes for our clients where art meets science, where beauty is felt as much as seen, where function and budget are considered, and where context, history and environment matter.
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Before the redesign, the building looked more like a drab office space than a student center. With its rust-colored brick, dark ribbon windows and hard-to-find main entrance, the building was not inviting to the students or the passersby on the main road that connected the university to downtown. But perhaps the biggest problem was that the back of the building was two stories higher than the basement floor and its central stairs were enclosed in concrete cylinders, making wayfinding challenging for students. “This project was about identity and clarity,” DiMella Shaffer principal Ed Hodges says. “The school needed a bold statement that would reorient the campus to the city and solve all
the accessibility and system-level issues relating to the building.” Hodges and his team had a solution, and it began with semantics. “We literally changed the name of the floor from the ‘basement floor’ to the ‘street level,’” project manager Alex Adkins says. The firm then redesigned the building, proposing a sleek glass tower and cascading open stairway to link the two entrances. The new glass stairway now physically and visually connects the two entrances. The tower stands as a welcoming beacon to the student body and larger community alike, who can now see each other from both sides of the glass window walls. “You can see how proud the students are,” Hodges says. “One student even said that he felt like he was going to an Ivy League school.” – Ann Chou
Photos by Robert Benson Photography, robertbensonphoto.com