Daytona Beach, Florida, USA
With views of the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, ikon.5 architects with Prosser landscape architects have created a new student building for Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University that includes a triple-height, amphitheater-style commons, accompanied by dining and lounge areas, offices, library, and events center.
Inspired by the gracefulness of birds in flight, the Mori Hosseini Student Union at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University is an expression of the university’s mission to teach the science, practice, and business of aviation, and aerospace.
Located at the entrance of its Daytona Beach campus, the building’s gently soaring form expressing flight creates an iconic identity for the university and embodies its student’s values of fearlessness, adventure, and discovery.
For its inspiring design, Mori Hosseini Student Union at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University has recently been awarded a 2022 International Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
Programmatically, the 177,000 square foot (16,444 square meters) student union building is an aeronautical athenaeum combining social learning spaces, an events center, club offices, student affairs offices, career services, dining, and the university library.
A soaring, triple-height commons integrates the collaborative social and learning environments.
The lounges, dining venues, group study rooms, clubs and organizations offices, career services, student affairs, and the university library wrap the commons and culminate in a multi-story amphitheater that overlooks the commons and building entry.
An event center that can accommodate up to 900 people is housed on the first floor.
The top floor houses the university library which is set beneath a dynamic 200-foot arching skylight that opens to the sky.
A roof terrace on the second floor allows students to gaze upon the adjacent runway of Daytona International Airport and beyond to rocket launches from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.
Creating this athenaeum of programmatic spaces for students of aviation and aerospace technology within a building that characterizes fearlessness and discovery of flight has given Embry-Riddle an iconic main building that appropriately expresses its mission.
Structurally expressive steel forms and curvilinear organic spaces create a language inspired by aeronautics.
Project: Mori Hosseini Student Union at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Architects: ikon.5 architects
Landscape Architects: Prosser, Inc.
Lighting Designer: Fisher Marantz Stone
Structural Engineering: Thornton Tomasetti
Civil Engineering: Parker Mynchenberg & Associates
General Contractor: Barton Malow Company
Client: Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Photographers: Brad Feinknopf Photography
