WEST HAVEN, Conn. — The University of New Haven recently celebrated a milestone in the construction of its new Bergami Center for Science, Technology, and Innovation.

The state-of-the-art facility, scheduled to open in early 2020, will house engineering and science labs, technologically advanced collaborative classrooms, video production studios, an atrium/café, and space for multidisciplinary student and faculty collaboration.

A topping-off ceremony recently marked the hoisting of the final beam for the Bergami Center for Science, Technology, and Innovation, signifying the near-completion of the world-class facility that will enable students to take their pioneering work to an even higher level.

“By creating this space, we are strengthening our commitment to educating the world’s next generation of problem solvers and preparing them to excel in the careers of the future,” said University of New Haven President Steve Kaplan. “Ultimately, we have no greater charge than this.”

The 40,000-square-foot facility is the centerpiece of the university’s Charger Challenge: the campaign for the University of New Haven, which endeavors to raise $100 million before 2020 to invest in student scholarships and the university’s culture of innovation.

The center is being named in honor of longtime university benefactors Samuel S. Bergami Jr. ’85 EMBA and Lois Bergami who ceremoniously signed the final beam that was hoisted and secured into place – topped with a tree for good luck.

“Founded nearly 100 years ago to meet the engineering and business needs of the region, the university now offers innovative and cutting-edge programs – such as cybersecurity, national security, data science, and biomedical engineering – that prepare our students for the careers of the future,” said Kaplan.

The facility is being built adjacent to Buckman Hall which houses the Tagliatela College of Engineering. It will serve as a primary point of contact for students from across the university interested in innovation and entrepreneurship. The building will be designed to help draw together resources from across the campus and to serve as a common space for students to develop and test ideas alongside their peers with mentorship from faculty, alumni, and corporate partners.

A central focus of the facility’s makerspace is providing tools and resources that enable students from across the university to work with industry partners to create prototypes of new ideas and innovative products.

More than one-third of building is “open space” that will foster idea exchange and teamwork. Instead of traditional faculty offices, it will feature co-working space to foster collaboration.

Designed by Svigals + Partners, this interdisciplinary building will serve as a central hub of activity between all of the University’s departments. At the heart of the Innovation Center is an atrium where students and administrators can gather together and collaborate.

“This building’s state-of-the-art science learning spaces, its technologically advanced ‘smart’ classrooms, and all of its additional pioneering features will provide an exceptional environment for our students to learn, create, and collaborate with each other,” said Kaplan. “Most importantly, it will provide even more opportunities for our students to develop the same forward-thinking mindset that Sam has demonstrated throughout his distinguished career. I am most grateful for Sam and Lois’s support, which is making this important initiative a reality.”

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The new tech center is part of GCCISD’s $267 million bond program that passed in May 2013. Located in Baytown, Texas, GCCISD is one of the fastest growing school districts in the state. The district projects more than 4,500 new students over the next decade, according to a demographic study. In response to this growth, local voters passed the $267 million bond program. Already, the school district has grown from 21,000 students when the bond passed in 2013 to nearly 24,000 students in 2018.

The 32,400-square-foot, two-story technology center, designed by Huckabee and constructed by Durotech, is situated on an eight-acre tract next to Alamo Elementary School. It showcases 3,900 square feet of training rooms on the first floor, where teachers can learn how to integrate technology and software into their classrooms, and a 2,000-square-foot network operating center with servers on the second floor. It also houses a 1,900-square-foot technology work area, 3,500 square feet of storage space, a warehouse for receiving technology equipment and office space.

“The facility will serve as the “brain center” for the district,” said JP Grom, vice president at Lockwood, Andrews & Newnam, Inc. (LAN), the firm that is serving as the program manager for the bond program. “It will allow GCCISD to store student and teacher data within the district, rather than relying on a third-party data facility. It will also serve as the district’s emergency operations center in the event of a hurricane or other emergencies.”

Other elements of the bond program include three new elementary schools, which opened in 2015, a new transportation center that was completed in 2017, and an agriculture science building that opened in 2018. The bond package also includes additions to four facilities, renovation of STEM labs in five schools and security upgrades. In addition, the bond package has enabled GCCISD to accomplish its goal of retiring $52 million in deferred maintenance.

LAN is a full-service consulting firm offering planning, engineering and program management services.

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KINGSPORT, Tenn. — Construction of Dobyns-Bennett High School’s new Regional Science and Technology Center (RSTC) is currently underway in the form of a large triangular-shaped structure that will serve as its new entrance.

The $20 million project currently sits in front of the Dobyns-Bennett High School campus and includes a new 75,000 square-foot, three-story, 400-seat facility with a mission to create a culture that inspires innovation through science and technology.

As designed, the new RSTC facility will feature a three-story atrium and include 18 science and tech labs, two teacher work spaces, six student work spaces, one TEAL (Technology Enhanced Active Learning) lab, one large research lab, four small research labs, a student café, and administrative offices.

Perkins+Will of Atlanta designed the new facility, and BurWil Construction Inc. of Bristol, Tenn., is serving as the project’s contractor.

“Because of the shape of the existing building there’s a different shape to the rooms, said Steve Trimble, project architect at Perkins+Will of Atlanta. “We have classrooms that can flip and change and be different things as needed.”

According to Kingsport City Schools, the overall goals for the RSTC facility include defining the Dobyns-Bennett main entrance, improving circulation and accessibility at Dobyns-Bennett for students and staff, capitalizing on an opportunity for a new identity for the Dobyns-Bennett facility while maintaining the current design and legacy elements, and adding an enhanced science and technology program at Dobyns-Bennett with new and enhanced facilities and programming while increasing Dobyns-Bennett’s student capacity.

The new facility would also raise Dobyns-Bennett’s capacity to support 2,500 students at 85 percent utilization, according to Kingsport City Schools.

“The client really had a vision that they wanted something specific so they really pushed us to create that thing,” said Trimble. “We toured buildings just to get an idea of the design of the buildings.”

Trimble said the buildings he toured together with Kingsport City school officials included other high schools Perkins+Will had completed in the Atlanta region.

For example, Trimble said that there was a tremendous amount of glass used to create an open and transparent façade of the facility. He said school officials benefited from seeing some of the same facades in other Perkins+Will school designs.

“It was important for them to see a building that had a lot of glass and realize that students were not going to be on display like a fishbowl kind of thing,” said Trimble.

Trimble said that one interesting part of the design process for the RSTC was adding on to the existing Dobyns-Bennett hexagon-like pod structure that was built in 1967.

According to the Times News, Dobyns-Bennett was touted as an “ultra-modern high school” with wall-to-wall carpet when it first opened in 1967. However 50 years later the design of having only one window per classroom has given way to a wall of windows that let in natural light according to the design of the new RSTC facility.

“We inverted that relationship and we’ve increased the views out into the mountains beyond so you get a really picturesque view from these classrooms that are higher than they were,” said Trimble.

Construction on the new facility began during the school’s 2017 winter break and is scheduled for completion on May 31, 2019; the facility is scheduled to open in August of 2019.

A report from the Times News contributed to this story.

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TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology recently announced that it received a $15 million lead gift from an anonymous donor to support construction of a new academic building that will provide collaboration workspaces, design studios, flexible classrooms, chemistry laboratories and faculty innovation spaces.

The anonymous donation will fund over half of the $29 million building that is set to open for the 2021-22 school year.

A groundbreaking ceremony for the new building will be held during the college’s homecoming on Saturday, Oct. 6.

The building was designed by RATIO Architects, and its architecture will have a central atrium and lots of interior and exterior glass to let in light and showcase the work taking place within, making it a “window into Rose” concept that showcases curricular innovation, laboratory activities and collaboration of students, faculty and staff members.

“The design of this new academic building reflects our focus on active engagement in learning within a collaborative, mentoring environment,” said Rose-Hulman President Jim Conwell.

“We’re grateful to our lead donor for supporting our vision for science, engineering and math education, and excited about the opportunities that lie ahead as a result of this generous gift.”

Located in Terre Haute, Indiana, Rose-Hulman has an enrollment of approximately 2,200 undergraduate students and nearly 100 graduate students.

The 60,000-square-foot, three-story building will be located on the east side of campus, between Moench Hall and Myers Hall.

The first floor of the new building will host flexible and easily adaptable design spaces for student projects and design studios for the new engineering design academic program. Students and teams will be able to utilize breakout spaces throughout the floor to collaborate on projects. Students also will have access to a prototyping laboratory, laser-cutting devices, machine tools and a woodworking shop.

Six classrooms with flexible learning spaces will be featured on the second floor, along with three breakout rooms and booths for student workspaces. Innovation spaces will allow faculty to work on research projects with students.

New state-of-the-art chemistry laboratories will provide separate spaces for instruction and hands-on learning of general, organic, analytical and physical chemistry, and undergraduate chemistry and biochemistry research with faculty.

There will be dedicated space for preparing chemistry and biochemistry experiments before moving activities to a laboratory, and facilities for faculty and students to explore edible chemistry projects. An instrument laboratory and an area for nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy equipment will also be included.

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Thursday’s Plenary session was given by Speaker Jaime Casap, a communication skills educator at the Phoenix Coding Academy in Arizona who spoke on the importance of computer science education. “I don’t want to start with the fact that education is broken, but ask what is the right education we need for the future that we face?” he asked the EDspaces audience. “Our job in education is to prepare kids for the future, but we also have to realize that the future is already here. A lot of that has to do with technology and computer science.”

He continued by addressing the fact that cloud computing is impacting everything we do and stated that all work will soon be automated to some degree. Because technology is able to support and enable what we do, students now more than ever need to be given the opportunity to solve problems instead of being asked to simply memorize information out of a text book.

“There is a need for a cultural shift that involves converting information into intelligence,” Casap said. “We need to be asking ourselves, ‘How do we convert that information that [students] memorize into intelligence?’”

Casap alluded to the fact that there should be fewer discussions about what the future classroom will look like because the classroom is undergoing constant iteration, changing to accommodate each new technology or learning concept. For instance, one innovative concept from the Phoenix Coding Academy is that its curriculum uses computer science in every class or subject it teaches.

Casap’s session seemed to go hand-in-hand with almost every talk at the conference. Another poignant one included a session given by Tomas Jimenez-Eliaeson, design director of learning environments for international architecture firm LITTLE. Jimenez-Eliason spoke about the idea of a transdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning. “Kids are now creating their own majors and crafting their own experiences because they’re seeing problems that are not being solved by just one discipline; multiple disciplines are required,” he said.

He pointed to teaching approaches in Finland where entire curriculums are doing away with individual subjects such as physics and math, and instead teaching by topic, which could apply to several subjects at once.

Craig Park, principal for The Sextant Group, also spoke on technology and how architects can design for big data. He pointed to several projects that incorporated large-scale technologies such as the Visualization Lab used for data analytics, located at North Carolina State’s James B. Hunt Jr. Library. Multi-touch visualization and group wireless sharing were other technologies trending in the data world.

Needless to say, the idea of ever-changing technologies and designing spaces to be flexible enough to constantly shift with those changes were top of mind at the conference. Jimenez-Eliaeson referenced a favorite quote from Futurist Alvin Toffler: “The illiterate of the 21^st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”

As adaptation will be key in these next generations of school design, what are you doing to adapt your education spaces?

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