#PAYETTEForward: Impactful Buildings

Our firm is passionate about the design of technologically complex buildings that are among the architectural professions most programmatically intricate and energy intensive. Our firm’s depth of expertise in science and healthcare has produced a body of boldly original and exquisitely crafted buildings that are as profoundly humane in their accommodation of vital social needs as they are pioneering in their pursuit of energy and environmental performance.

It’s only through a thorough understanding of how buildings such as hospitals, laboratories and institutions function – and how their inhabitants use them, that we are able to propose new configurations of space and systems that permit people to heal, make discoveries and innovate. We believe that architecture at its core is about people, and that every project is rooted in its own unique story and its design should reflect the soul of the inhabitants and place so they in turn can create an impact of their own.

In the past few years alone, we have designed buildings at universities, such as Northeastern University, Boston University and Amherst College that have received critical acclaim as innovative, both in design and performance, hubs for the future of scientific research. Currently under construction, the Fifth XiangYa Hospital will provide a new world class model for the delivery of healthcare in China, accommodating over 100,000 patients a day and housing over 2,500 patient rooms. With all of our work and projects, we take pride in not only exceeding our clients’ needs and expectations, but setting our own.

Faced with an aging science center unable to accommodate today’s technologies, equipment and pedagogies, Amherst College sought a new, forward-looking building that would create an open learning environment for the entire campus community for the next 100 years. From overall organization to detailing, the design promotes transparency and interaction. Most of the activity in the Science Center is visible to the College through the glass walls of the commons.

Catherine Sanderson’s teaching classrooms, research space and office are all located in the Science Center. As a result, interaction between students and faculty has increased, she added.

The Rajen Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences and Engineering is a nine-story, high-intensity academic research building that supports a wide range of research modes to serve existing and future scientific communities. The compact building occupies a prominent location on a tight urban site along Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue. It embraces the notion that collaboration happens everywhere – in the corridors, at the desks and in the labs.

In her former digs at 677 Beacon Street, Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, a College of Engineering professor of biomedical engineering and CRESCENT director, had laboratory space scattered from the basement to the third floor. Her graduate students and postdocs had desks, and office space, on all four floors. “I would literally not see people in my lab unless they came to my room,” she says.

Now, everyone is together in her new ninth floor Kilachand Center lab.

The Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex (ISEC) launches Northeastern University’s long-term goal of linking its Huntington Avenue Campus with a new academic precinct along Columbus Avenue, connecting the Fenway and Roxbury neighborhoods of Boston. A new pedestrian bridge—PedX—spans the intervening MBTA and Amtrak rail lines, leading students to the ISEC’s six-story atrium, a new hub for the expanded campus.

We are thrilled to see our buildings filled with people and activity, and we can’t wait to see what impacts the people inside the buildings will make in the future!