An excerpt from Biz 417:
Biz 417: First impressions are essential in college recruiting. How did that influence this project?
Andrew Wells: A lot, I would say. The whole goal was to provide a sort of physical and symbolic point of entry into the campus, the idea being that they would have a worthy place for greeting visitors, prospective students and parents and guests of the university.
Biz: The building contains references to MSU’s history. Can you describe them?
AW: A lot of people that have seen the building may recognize the perforated screen that’s on the west side that sort of extends out. That’s a gesture of welcome right at the entrance to campus and it identifies the main entry point into the building. That perforation pattern was developed by scanning a typical black-and-white composition book that’s used for essays. We scanned that pattern and then digitized it and translated it into this dot pattern of circles. So that provides a sun shade to cut down on solar heat gain from the west side, but it also has this reference back to the fact that it was originally a teacher’s college and it’s all about education. The other reference is the slate wall that leads you in, which is a reference back to the old chalkboards.
Biz: This building welcomes guests, houses offices and hosts events. Was it challenging to incorporate the multiple functions?
AW: I think that was one of the issues that we had to really think through. How do we design in enough specificity that it’s identified as a university building—not just a university building, but Missouri State’s building—while at the same time being open-ended and flexible for a variety of things that we couldn’t even imagine yet.
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