Lehigh College Singleton, Hitch, and Maida Residential Homes / Sasaki

Textual content description supplied by the architects. In 2016, Sasaki started working with Lehigh College to rework the coed residential expertise on campus. After figuring out a long-term technique for renovating current housing, taking outdated buildings offline, and including capability to help the varsity’s development, the varsity, and the design workforce recognized what was lacking on campus: hangout and group examine areas and a “bridge” typology that gives extra privateness than a standard dormitory however extra neighborhood than apartment-style housing.

The brand new residential homes present this desired house by strategically weaving collectively a typical route the place college students could make connections and strengthen their residential neighborhood. The design additionally features a cohesive technique for open house that respects the historic campus character and steep topographic situations. The buildings are sculpturally crafted throughout the scale of Lehigh’s conventional residence halls. The fabric palette picks up on the campus’ prevalent Pennsylvania bluestone and steel roofs, whereas the iron spot brick alternating between clean and rusticated textures harmonizes with the iron-rich native stone used on surrounding buildings.

Designed for Connection. The campus is presently organized round east-west terraces with few north-south (up/downhill) connections given Lehigh’s steep topography. The brand new housing complicated, comprising the South Cluster and North Cluster buildings, provides a brand new accessible public route that traverses six tales of grade change and hyperlinks collectively pupil life applications. The design additionally opens up views and new out of doors areas that join the campus’s historic core to the residential hillside. The ultimate design efficiently reconnects the residential expertise to the broader coronary heart of campus with a sustainable and modern residing atmosphere.

An Built-in Panorama. The panorama design, along with bridging massive variations in elevation, gives energetic areas that stream from indoor pupil life venues to new out of doors leisure alternatives. The workforce studied the ecology of the encompassing woodlands to fine-tune plantings and replace the core campus’s parklike panorama to offer habitat restoration and stormwater administration. These efforts prolong onto the inexperienced roofs of the buildings, connecting the whole complicated to its panorama.

Architectural Character. The central campus contains dramatic views and stone buildings which might be skilled within the spherical. On the campus periphery, lengthy, linear residential buildings type courtyards. The brand new buildings echo the strong, prismatic types of the core campus whereas additionally framing new, energetic courtyards. Their kinds are impressed by the campus context of late-Nineteenth-century stone and brick laboratories and housing on a dramatic, lush mountainside panorama.

The Pupil Expertise. The brand new housing cluster will foster pupil wellness, with a steadiness of labor and play whereas offering neighborhood identification. Key applications, together with school rooms, a health heart, a café, and multi-purpose areas help psychological and bodily well being for college kids immersed in rigorous educational applications. As a college with 5 faculties and quite a lot of diploma applications that emphasize project-based studying — Lehigh presents a chance to foster an mental life primarily based on interpersonal connection.

Sustainability. Reflecting Lehigh’s spectacular historical past as a pacesetter in science and engineering, environmental stewardship and sustainability are key elements of the neighborhood. Particular methods proposed embrace an built-in suite of stormwater administration elements, energy-efficient constructing programs, and a photo voltaic hot-water demonstration system.