brown university office of admissions
in construction documentation / UTILE
the new office of admissions is located in the sciences library on brown’s campus, which is located on the traditional lands of the wampanoag,
pokanoket and narragansett peoples.
PROJECT STATS
PROGRAM HIGHER EDUCATION
LOCATION PROVIDENCE, RI
SIZE 3,700 sF
HEIGHT 1 storY, 14’-0”
CONSTRUCTION TYPE IA
an interior renovation of an iconic brutalist building from 1969. the brief challenged the team to meet the program requirements of the office of admissions team, while also employing previously established finish guidelines and celebrating the architectural interest of the exposed concrete superstructure.
The building was designed by Warner Burns Toan & Lunde architects to house the physical collection of Brown’s library holdings falling under the science and engineering disciplines. Floors 3 through 13 were originally designed to store this collection in linear stacks arranged from east to west across an open floor plan. These floors were identical in their configuration: one-way slabs with deep, integral beams span between concrete service cores aligned at the tower’s east and west sides.
utile was brought in to reconfigure the 14th floor to meet the needs of the office of admissions, a hybrid-working team with storage requirements for swag, and varied types of presentation spaces for admissions season. overall, the architectural team wanted to continue the concept of daylighting well into the center of the floor, as initially intended with an open floor plan. to achieve this, we maintained an ambuatory circulation, and integreated interior storefronts in nearly every interior program (save the storage and wc). the kitchenette, located plan north, offered an opportunity to introduce built-in seating with an acoustic slat wall that mimics the spacing of the concrete seams, imprinted on the superstructure by its wooden formwork.
