We recently celebrated the steel topping off at Boston College’s Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society (IISS). This is an important milestone on every project, but achieving it on schedule during these unprecedented times is even more celebratory than ever before.
The special occasion brought together academic leaders, the capital projects and facilities team from BC, the design team and construction manager team from Suffolk. We all signed the beam and then watched it being lifted to the ridge of the main building entry gable. It was a moment when we were all connected as contributors to this significant new building, even in a socially distant way.
The IISS will be home to the new Engineering program at Boston College. Located prominently at the heart of BC’s Middle Campus, the 157,000 GSF building will have a collegiate gothic exterior contextual to its neighbors, yet a very transparent, high performance interior core. It will house interdisciplinary research and core labs, a clean room, three maker spaces, ideation labs, general purpose classrooms, an auditorium, computer science research, with associated offices and social spaces. The project integrates sustainable strategies that reduce energy consumption, targeting a 25% site-energy savings and an EUI of 89 kBtu/sf-yr. Anticipated completion is early 2022.
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Opening later this year, the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, MA is an essay in the tuning of building façades for performance. The aluminum sunshades that veil the building began as a concept tested by scoring Bristol paper. The team utilized tools from all modalities: paper models, CNC-mills, parametric studies, solar analysis, wind and water simulations and full-scale mock-ups to inform the design and drive energy use down. The ultra-high performance building is tracking a 61% reduction in energy use compared to the 2030 baseline.
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