Building design reflects vision of Innovation Campus

This project is interesting, I think, in that really every discipline has a story to tell. My role is really to kind of establish the vision of the architecture. And so it's everything from the large scale, sort of urban planning campus planning to the articulation of the building itself. To fit 300,000 square feet of program into the building. And then, you know, one of our ideas had to do with making the building relate to the sun and incorporating photovoltaics. So kind of shaping the building to both be able to kind of adapt to the movement of the sun, but also all the kind of programmatic demands. And the fact that it really needed to be a, you know, calling card for Virginia Tech here in Northern Virginia. This is the loft space, and it's basically a space that's very open to the streets, a ground floor, activated space, where students are going to be doing their capstone projects and research projects. This is what we call the drone cage. It's a two story space where drone research and implementation can happen. What you see here are radiant ceiling panels. And what these are doing are heating and cooling the room with water, as opposed to air. So there are a series of coils that sit up above these panels, and there's a large surface area of these in each of the spaces, and they are basically, heating and cooling the space through water. In the spirit of computation of computer science, computer engineering. We have a computational parametric model that flexed the form, went through thousands of iterations to optimize the building form, you know, again, for photovoltaics, but really balanced also for solar heat gain for glare, for kind of comfort for views, and daylight. On a typical building, you might see photovoltaics just on the roof. So in this case, we were studying if and how it could be used on the facade of the building because that's a lot of surface area to incorporate. So we have not only conventional photovoltaics on the roof, but two other technologies. One, on the south of the building, we have these horizontal glass fins that are photovoltaic. So they're actually shading the building passively, but then generating electricity to actively. And then on the southeast, we have what's called BIPV building integrated photovoltaic. And what that is is insulated glass with photovoltaic on the outside. This will be one of the first buildings in the United States to use that technology. Curiosity is sort of one of the important drivers for innovation in general. So I think we wanted the building to invoke curiosity and to be able to express some things that buildings perhaps normally don't. For me, personally, it's quite special since I am a Virginia Tech grad. For grad school I went to Virginia Tech for architecture for a master's of architecture. I think that kind of full circle from being a student at Virginia Tech and being able to work on the design of this project is quite meaningful and really exciting.