Swarthmore's new $48-million science complex takes the LEED in green building design. | Chronicle | Read
At Swarthmore, a Green Building as a Billboard for Science
By LAWRENCE BIEMILLER

Swarthmore, Pa.

It sounds like a recipe for disaster: Start with three used science buildings. Add two architecture firms and a photocopied draft of some sustainability guidelines. Agitate with a 50-member advisory committee worried about student safety, storm-water runoff, and songbird deaths. Blend in stone, steel, glass, wood, and panels made from compressed sunflower-seed hulls. Add $48-million and let rise, then fill with heavy-duty air-handling systems, high-tech lab equipment, casual furniture, and a cafe. Garnish with gardens. Unveil.

A disaster? Far from it. At Swarthmore College, that proved to be the recipe for a science complex so imaginative and engaging that it sets a new standard.

The Swarthmore Science Center brings together biologists, chemists, computer scientists, mathematicians, and physicists in a 140,000-square-foot structure whose components are all small enough that the complex doesn't overwhelm its campus neighbors. It is about as friendly to the environment as a science building can be. Like Jefferson's pavilions at the University of Virginia, it not only provides locations for teaching but also teaches. And like Henry Hornbostel's College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University, or the museum complex Michael Graves designed for Emory University, it's a delight to walk through, offering attractive, comfortable spaces and touches of whimsy.

The two architecture firms involved in the project were Einhorn Yaffee Prescott, which brought experience with laboratories, and Helfand Architecture, which contributed the overall arrangement of the complex and the design of the public spaces (Margaret Helfand, the firm's principal, attended Swarthmore). The project got its start in 1999, when the college committed to a major overhaul of its science facilities — Martin Hall, an Art Moderne biology building from the 1930s; a glass-walled science library from the 1980s with a view over a wooded tract owned by the college; and a multiwinged 1960s building, Dupont Hall, that housed teaching and research laboratories, classrooms, and offices for chemistry, computer science, mathematics, and physics.

The overhaul was long overdue, says Rachel Merz, a biology professor who served as chairman of the science-project users group. Dupont, like many lab buildings from the 60s, had ceilings too low to accommodate modern lab-ventilation systems — "the fume hoods were a scandal," Ms. Merz says. The building also had an electrical system inadequate to modern demands. Adding insult to injury, most people thought that Dupont, an International Style structure covered in concrete panels faced with pebbles, was the college's ugliest building.

After considering several schemes, the architects, the advisory committee, and the college settled on demolishing some parts of Dupont in favor of a new building to house the labs, which would have the latest ventilation systems and clear sight lines that would give faculty members uninterrupted views of students' work. But other parts of Dupont could be gutted and recycled for faculty offices and classrooms. The plan also envisioned a large, airy new social space, roughly in the middle of the complex, to bring together members of the various science departments. The commons would serve nonscience students as well, since Swarthmore lacks a student center.

The college was committed to putting up a building respectful of the environment — particularly Crum Creek, which runs through the college's woods and carries much of the storm-water runoff from the campus. But the advisory committee debated at length about whether to take the extra step of seeking certification in the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, commonly known as LEED, which rates buildings as certified, silver, gold, or platinum. The LEED guidelines were still in draft form in 1999, says E. Carr Everbach, an associate professor of engineering who became head of the "green group" within the advisory committee. "We did a quick cut and thought we were on the silver-gold border," he says.

Eventually the committee recommended taking part in the LEED-certification process — mostly, says Mr. Everbach, "to hold our feet to the fire" during the project's inevitable cost-cutting phases. Janet Semler, the college's director of planning and construction, says that building the complex to LEED standards added about 3 percent to the cost. But she says it "gave our development staff another opportunity to talk to prospective donors."

Because the old labs had to remain in use until their replacements were completed, the complex was built and opened in stages that demanded what Ms. Helfand calls "some pretty fancy logistics" by the college and by the general contractor, Skanska USA Building. The science center's completion was celebrated last year.

The complex's primary entrance is at the north end of an axis that begins at the train station on the south side of the campus and climbs up the middle of an impressive allée to the college's main building, Parrish Hall. Behind Parrish, the axis follows an open passage through another building, crosses the North Quad, and slips under a high colonnade to reach a sheltered, Asian-inspired garden in the middle of the science center.

The garden has walks made of Pennsylvania bluestone, as well as two seating areas. One wall of a stair tower is covered in smoothly finished panels of black stone that can serve as a blackboard — faculty members in the sciences said they had always wanted to teach outdoors, like their colleagues in the humanities, but needed blackboards to do so. Wissahickon schist, a local stone featured in many other Swarthmore buildings, is used for the science center's most prominent walls, alternating with large windows and nicely fitted metal panels. Also bordering the garden are two of the Dupont wings that weren't demolished. With new windows, they look passable as part of a larger composition.

East of the garden, in the new building, are the chemistry department's classrooms, labs, and offices, along with the smaller of the science center's two lecture halls. On top of the lecture hall is an astronomy observation deck, along with the structural steel for an observatory dome and a concrete telescope mount that rises through the building without being connected to it, to reduce vibration for a telescope if one is ever installed. North and west of the garden, in the renovated wings of Dupont, are classrooms and offices for math and computer science, as well as a "living room" for the math department that opens onto the garden.

Many faculty members' offices have what Ms. Semler describes as a yin-yang pairing. Dupont's structural columns dictate a pattern of window openings that would normally result in shoebox-shaped offices, but faculty members said they wanted enough space to meet with students. So in each pair of offices, one is narrower near the door and wider near the window, and the other is wider near the door and narrower near the window, giving each office enough room for a small table. In math professors' offices, the yin-yang walls are floor-to-ceiling blackboards, magnetized so that chalk ledges can be stuck wherever faculty members like; computer-science faculty members asked for whiteboards instead.

Hallways outside of math professors' offices have benches for students waiting to see the faculty members; computer-science students wanted sofas for napping. At the ends of hallways, windows illuminate small seating areas where students can study or socialize. Where possible, stairs are attractively finished and have windows that offer views — the idea, Ms. Semler says, was to encourage people to take the stairs rather than the elevators. But the elevators are entertaining, too. Because floor levels in the existing buildings didn't match up, elevators in the complex make stops like 1.0, 1.2, 1.5, 2.0, and so on.

"As we shaped 80,000 square feet of new space," says Ms. Helfand, "we asked, How would it feel to be in this building, to walk past this building?" Being in the building is indeed a pleasure — corridors offer a variety of finishes and views, as do rooms. If the building has a weakness, it may be in how it feels to walk past. The large lecture hall juts out from the rest of complex, presenting an almost-blank stone wall to the North Quad. Putting the lecture hall where it is makes sense for a variety of reasons — and any building involves trade-offs — but from the North Quad, that one stark wall can dominate the view of the complex.

Just past the wall, tucked back within the complex, is the commons, the science center's most spectacular and inviting space. Walls of glass face both north and south. Part hallway and part hangout, it has tables big enough to accommodate teams working on projects, as well as comfortable chairs for reading or napping. From the far side of the commons, students and faculty members can head for the science library and the biology building, which received minor renovations.

Concrete pillars and laminated-wood cantilevers support the commons's high butterfly roof, its wings sloping inward to meet at a metal channel visible from below. Outside, the channel collects rainwater and directs it across a lower roof into what becomes, when it rains, an outdoor waterfall. It's a delightful reminder of the building's sustainable design: A smaller waterfall leads the water into a gravel box that takes it to an underground cistern for reuse, instead of sending it down to scour Crum Creek. Built into a stone wall nearby is the second of three outdoor blackboards; the third is on a terrace looking west, into the woods.

"The project was meant not only to upgrade the labs," says Ms. Helfand, the architect, "but also to be a billboard for science" — a billboard that would attract both good students and good faculty members. A challenge for the designers, she says, was, "How can you take sustainable principles and turn them into architecture?" In several places, the science center offers answers. A longer storm-water channel doubles as bench seating in a sunken garden north of the commons, where the grade was lowered so that full-size windows could be installed to bring daylight to what had been the basement of Dupont.

In the commons itself, a wall of gauges beside the cafe tells students how much energy the building is consuming. And some panes of glass in the complex's big windows are translucent, rather than transparent, to keep birds from trying to fly right through the building — a problem the college had with Ms. Helfand's earlier classroom building on the campus, Kohlberg Hall.

Many of the science center's sustainability features are harder to spot, like the wainscoting made of panels of compressed sunflower seeds. And some features are invisible. Faculty members, for instance, can open windows in their offices without affecting safety systems designed to make sure that air is always being pulled into labs and then vented outside, rather than circulating back into hallways after possibly picking up contaminants. And the labs' fume hoods, which suck large amounts of air out of the building, were designed with heat exchangers to recapture some of the warmth, or chill, that the heating and air-conditioning system had previously added to it.

In the end, the science center received LEED certification but just missed a silver ranking. And it is using slightly more electricity than anticipated — in part, college officials believe, because it is so popular with students. "A single student will turn on all the lights in a 200-seat lecture hall to study," says Tom Cochran, of the college's facilities-management department. Ms. Helfand notes that students have asked the administration to leave the building open around the clock. "If you create really inviting spaces," she says, "people will come."