Bar Harbor, Maine, USA
“As we gather around this magnificent oak tree, I hope you’ll reflect upon an attitude about architecture that puts the natural world on stage, making it a focal point—the star of the show. Where architecture frames the natural world and provides a backdrop for campus life,” states Susan T. Rodriguez.
Sited at the north end of the College of the Atlantic campus, the Davis Center for Human Ecology created by Susan T. Rodriguez and OPAL Architecture, is a two-story L-shaped building, with wings that meet at a 120-degree angle, following the promontory overlooking the bay.
“It’s not an ‘object’ building,” says Rodriguez, “it is more about the memorable experience and generating the framework for that to happen.”
The Davis Center for Human Ecology has recently been awarded a 2022 American Architecture Awards Honorable Mention by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
On the land-facing side, the L shape encloses a protected space, which is the point of arrival, with a greenhouse next to the entrance and an open area where students can gather around a giant oak tree.
Inside the interdisciplinary Davis Center, both floors are devoted to studios for painting and printmaking, and labs for botany, chemistry, geology, and physics, as well as classrooms, faculty offices, and meeting spaces.
Labs and classrooms on the second level have ceilings with a gentle pitch upward, so that the tall windows reveal stunning views of the water and trees.
At the juncture of the two arms, wedge-shaped spaces on each floor accommodate lectures.
In one wing, Rodriguez and her team cut through the two floors to create light wells that alternate with faculty offices.
On the ground floor, these vertical shafts become alcoves for study; on the second level, they are flanked by narrow bridges that link offices to the main hallway.
The Campus building is designed to be a model of sustainability, using 80 percent less energy than a normally code-compliant classroom or lab.
While the college is not seeking certification, it is following the Passive House standard, which requires a thermally robust, airtight envelope for heating and cooling, so that energy use intensity (EUI) is no more than 12k BTUs per square foot per year.
“A typical building with art studios and labs is 10 times the EUI of the Davis Center,” notes Timothy Lock, OPAL principal.
Almost all of the structure is wood, with its carbon-storing properties, including glue-laminated beams and posts (the latter concealed behind gypsum board), and structural floor decking of local spruce.
On the exterior, local northern white cedar, with ship-lapped joints in a horizontal and vertical pattern, acts as a rain screen.
The building is insulated with dense-pack cellulose in all wall and roof cavities, and the exterior walls above grade are built with 5½ inches of continuous, rigid wood-fiber insulation board.
The architects minimized expanses of glass at the back of the building to afford protection against the strong winds coming off the water from the north and east. All windows are triple-glazed and treated with a UV-reflective coating perceptible to flying birds but not humans.
The wings facing to the south deploy larger expanses of glass, to take advantage of the sun’s light and warmth in winter, but a brise soleil of horizontal metal grating mitigates solar load, while deep vertical cedar fins alternate with vertical steel framing on the west-facing wing.
Inside the center, natural materials, such as local eastern white pine for the beams, ceilings, and wall paneling, add texture and warmth.
For heating and cooling, the design emphasizes passive measures, with only a simple mechanical system supplying 100 percent outdoor air.
On the roof, the array of solar panels is expected to cover 75 percent of the total EUI, in accordance with COA’s requirements for all new buildings on campus.
The Davis Center conforms admirably to the college’s goals for sustainability, as well as being a place where students can meet and pursue programs that take advantage of the outdoors, including the study of agriculture on two farms owned by the school and marine life on two offshore research stations.
The school-year weather can be challenging, with gusty sea air and the occasional nor’easter—and sometimes a blinding blizzard as early as Thanksgiving.
Yet the students find much to do after the summer people have gone home. And now they have the new Davis Center to help them interact with each other, enhance their academic investigations, and bond in a new way with nature.
Project: Davis Center for Human Ecology, College of the Atlantic
Architects: Susan T Rodriguez | Architecture • Design PLLC.
Lead Architect: Susan T. Rodriguez
Associate Architects: OPAL Architecture
General Contractor: E.L. Shea Inc.
Client: College of the Atlantic
Photographer: Jameson Lowrey, Trent Bell, Jen Holt Photography, and John Gordon
