My name is Bjarke Ingels. I am the founder of the Bjarke Ingels Group, and we are the architects of the Robert Day Sciences Center. The Robert Day Sciences Center brings together computer science, data science, and life sciences together in an integrated environment.
It is the first building as part of the master plan for the Claremont McKenna campus that sort of extends the mall into a zig-zag of malls, and in that sense, it is almost like a distributor of flows. We have imagined the sciences center as a series of parallel building volumes, side by side, with a public space in between, that are rotated in all the directions of the mall, so east, west, north, south, and southwest, northeast.
So in that sense, even though each of the individual building volumes are rational, flexible, capable of being computer labs or wet labs, the spaces in between becomes an almost Piranesian three-dimensional space, where from every level, you can see fellow students, faculty, colleagues, professors on multiple levels. So even if you are actually sort of focused and spends most of your time in a wet lab or in a computer lab or in a classroom, you will constantly have visual and sometimes physical friction that will allow sparks to fly between you and some of your fellow students, and that will actually stimulate the exchange of ideas across the traditional silos of knowledge. In that sense, you can almost see the Robert Day Sciences Center as a crucible or a mixing chamber, where all the different kinds of knowledge, all the different kinds of people, all the different kinds of students and teachers, all come together in one complex, three-dimensional - uh, learning environment.
