Princeton, New Jersey, USA
TenBerke presents its “most ambitious completed work to date,” a 485,000-square-foot project comprising two new residential campuses at Princeton University, each serving 510 students giving the architectural expression to Princeton’s commitment to ground its social life in a campus characterized by inclusion and belonging.
The project has been awarded an Honorable Mention at the 2023 American Architecture Awards from The Chicago Athenaeum and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
As a capstone project in Princeton’s 40-year implementation of a residential college system—the buildings are the seventh and eighth colleges on campus—it achieves the university’s longstanding objective to have all undergraduates affiliated (and, for the most part, living in) four-year residential colleges.
By strengthening social identities through the residential college community, the project recenters campus social life within the colleges, providing a counterbalance to options elsewhere.
As the institution looks to grow its student body, the new residential colleges are designed to be approachable and inclusive: easy to navigate, easy to find your place, easy to make your own.
Altogether, the new colleges enrich the daily lives of undergraduates across all four years of college with spaces for socializing, dining, making, living, and learning.
Conceived of as a village, the new buildings forge connections: to campus, to woodlands, to recreation, and most importantly, between students.
New College West (NCW) sits to the west, Yeh College to the east, and while they speak with a shared architectural vocabulary, they retain distinct identities—cousins, not twins. NCW is taller, embedded in an intact woodland, and features soft-grey metal “treehouses”.
Yeh College is low-slung but outward-looking, facing out onto campus on all sides. Both are crafted in a mixture of warm grey calcium silicate brick chosen for their texture and sparkle throughout daylight’s course, a contemporary interpretation of historic masonry on campus.
Wood-formed and textured precast concrete sits alongside long glass walls framed with warm white oak, forming an inviting, transparent “ground floor” across the eight residence halls.
Public and social activities are located in these common zones, marking another intentional departure from much of the campus’s traditionally hermetic, inward-facing architecture.
A principle of visibility runs throughout the design: by allowing students to make visual connections to activities within, they are empowered with choices in how to participate and build community, all on their own terms.
Universal access was equally important.
The site negotiates a 20-foot drop in grade from north to south without requiring a single stair.
TenBerke and Field Operations tackled this by manipulating the 12-acre site in section as much as in plan. Interconnected walkways gradually rake across the slope, and all users are led to use the same paths.
A central courtyard subtly reveals the drama of the grade change: the dining rooms for each college are tucked into the slope on their respective sides of the courtyard, allowing natural light to flood deep into these spaces.
Project: Princeton University Residential Colleges
Architects: TenBerke
Lead Architect: Maitland Jones and Arthi Krishnamoorthy
Design Team: Deborah Berke, Noah Biklen, Aaron Plewke, Stephen Brockman, Scott Price, Joshua Wujek, Matthew Scarlett, Andrew Ledbetter, Emily Kim, Kurt Nieminen, Elizabeth Snow, Lloyd DesBrisay, Wells Megalli, Tori McGovern, Daniel Montalvo, Davis Owen, Lynette Salas, Harsha Sharma, Kate Warren, and Rong Zhao
General Contractor: Hunter Roberts Construction Group
Client: Princeton University
Photographers: Christopher Cooper / Arch Explorer and Christopher Payne/ESTO