Choate Rosemary Hall Science Center

A system of overlapping radial and angular geometries determined the building’s main components: a three-story “L” (housing laboratories and classrooms) and an angled two-story wing (with additional teaching facilities, a science office and conservatory). The two components interlock around a transparent glass conoid and the outdoor courtyard it shelters, so that interior circulation spaces are filled with light and animated by a dynamic exchange of indoor-outdoor views.

The building engages its hillside site with significant projections into the landscape. A 160-foot bridge, spanning a new pond on the west, connects the lower campus with the second-story entrance. The bridge continues inside as an open corridor around the conoid and emerges to form a 100- foot banked walkway into the upper campus. The science center thus provides a major pedestrian link between the previously separate schools, permitting barrier-free access over what had been impossible terrain to negotiate.

Internal organization is arranged vertically by scientific discipline, each level being connected by sub-floor communications to a campus-wide computer network. Laboratories are evenly illuminated by fluorescent lights in the coffers of the structural concrete ceilings, and provided direct air supply/return by strategically located mechanical penthouses. Also on the roof are an observatory platform and skylights for the building’s four staircases, one of which houses a Foucault pendulum that monitors the earth’s rotation. The building’s lower level houses a 130-seat auditorium.