When a university in Massachusetts decided to develop a new life sciences campus, it acquired land on a brownfield site at the edge of a working-class residential neighborhood. This new branch of campus would contain a public park and public amenities to provide space for the university and residential communities to co-mingle.

Within the new campus, off the central greenway, two laboratory buildings share a lobby that is open to the public and houses a café, restaurant and daycare center. The lobby also provides the science community with a lecture room, conference center, meeting areas, and reception functions. Our proposed material palette-- earthen walls, felted wool, milled aluminum, pressed cork, and raw wood and stone-- unite the public and the scientific community in a tangible spatial experience.

Due to these various programmatic and circulation demands, we sought to nest episodic social spaces within the vast lobby while also creating a sense of coherence to the overall space. We proposed to use the reclaimed dirt from the excavation of the brownfield site to build a series of curvilinear walls and furniture made of raw earth construction. These elements, strategically placed throughout the space, give form to the multiple paths of movement and places for stasis.