Core Design Team

Firm: Mithun

WALTER SCHACHT, ARCHITECTURE
LANA LISITSA, ARCHITECTURE
CIMA MALEK-ASLANI, ARCHITECTURE
ARIELLE CROWDER, INTERIOR DESIGN
LOWELL DAY, ARCHITECTURE
DOROTHY FARIS, LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
SEAMUS KELLY, ARCHITECTURE
DAWID POL, ARCHITECTURE
BRENDAN CONNOLLY, ARCHITECTURE
MICHAEL EVERETT, ARCHITECTURE
CLAIRE MCCONNELL, ARCHITECTURE
CAITLIN SQUIER-ROPER, LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
CLAIRE JOSEPH, ARCHITECTURE
BRANDON THARP, ARCHITECTURE
STEVE CARLUCCI, LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

Consultants/Collaborators

Design Builder: Lease Crutcher Lewis
Structural: KPFF Consulting Engineers
Design Build Mechanical: Apollo/Glumac
Design Build Electrical: Cochran/Hargis
Civil: OTAK, Inc.
Acoustical: A3 Acoustics, LLP
LEED: O’Brien360
Irrigation Consultant: William Brown Landscape Architect
Building Envelope: 4EA Building Science Inc – SE
Accessibility Consultant: Studio Pacifica

Project Narrative

CONVERGING PATHWAYS

Innovation Hall demonstrates how architecture connects institutions, people, places and nature. The STEM facility is joint effort of the University of Washington and Cascadia College. It unifies their shared campus in Bothell, Washington, creates career pathways for students and heals the native landscape of a remarkable site.

Motivating students, especially those from historically underrepresented populations, to pursue careers in STEM fields is a fundamental goal for the project. The four-story, 80,000 sf building contains labs and classrooms for chemistry, biology, physics, computer science, and mechanical and electrical engineering, informal student gathering and study areas and faculty offices. The project is certified LEED Gold.

INSTITUTIONAL PATHWAYS

Design Process Connects Partners
The college and the university were in the early phases of design for separate STEM facilities when financial constraints brought them together to create a single, shared use academic building in spite of historical challenges with institutional collaboration. The design-build team helped them overcome their apprehensions, facilitating change management by engaging stakeholders in a dialogue about a common vision for project success.

The project opened the door to embracing a shared community identity, inviting students to start at a community college and continue their four-year education in the same inclusive and innovative learning environment while fostering faculty collaborations across curriculum and research.

CAREER PATHWAYS

Learning on Display
Innovation Hall puts learning on display, opening doors to career pathways which are fundamental to both institutions’ approach to student recruitment, achievement and retention for their diverse student bodies. Floor to ceiling glass at the ground floor provides views into the dynamic activity of the university’s engineering capstone labs stimulating students’ interest in advanced programs and careers.

Real-life work environments support project-based learning. For example, one of the college’s computer sciences classrooms looks through a glazed wall to a server room where students work on network projects connecting instruction to practice.

Fostering Collaboration and Engagement
Shared student gathering and informal study spaces located in public areas on each floor provide a range of social and study environments, bringing university and college students together as a community of learners. They are patterned after a contemporary workplace, which typically includes spaces for individual and collaborative work, and socializing. Diverse, nontraditional students contributed to the design of these spaces, helping create an environment which makes them feel at home and responds to their busy lives.

Dedicated labs, classrooms and faculty offices for each institution allow the college and the university to expand their academic programs to reach a broad audience inclusive of underrepresented populations. Spaces are organized to bring the institutions’ similar programs close to one another, fostering collaboration between and creating opportunities for cross-disciplinary studies. The flow connects structured study, hands-on work, research, prototyping and the exchange of ideas.

CAMPUS PATHWAYS

Connecting Campus Spaces
Innovation Hall traverses a steep, forested hillside. The four-story building opens onto the main campus pedestrian spine at the bottom of the slope, connecting the college’s precinct of academic buildings and open spaces to the north with the university’s precinct to the south. Curtainwall glazing in study areas, labs and classrooms opens views from the outside to student activities inside and from inside to the surrounding woods and wetlands.

The building’s south façade bends to embrace the hillside creating terraces that connect program spaces to the forested environment and provide outdoor places for instruction on three levels of the building. The articulated brick skin reflects the verticality and texture of the surrounding conifer trees.

A Journey of Discovery
Innovation Hall’s section provides an accessible, experiential pathway from the ground level to the fourth floor which allows people to navigate the steep hillside inside the building. Along the way, common spaces foster student, faculty and staff engagement. Interior glazing at classrooms and labs opens views into the activities inside.

The section is organized around a monumental four-story stair in the east end of the building and a three-story atrium towards the west end. Together, they anchor the gathering and informal study spaces. Their skylights bring daylight deep into the building.

The building’s west entry is at the top of the slope, across from the college’s parking garage. It features a belvedere looking out over the forested hillside and an art installation centering a rain garden.

NATURE’S PATHWAYS

Restoring the Hillside
Innovation Hall’s relationship to the hillside maintains the character of the Bothell campus. The experience of the building and the landscape celebrates the institutions’ commitment to environmental stewardship, making it part of people’s lives. Views of the forest from study spaces, labs, classrooms and offices foster biophilic connections.

The building connects the site’s distinct landscape typologies from the upland forest at the west end of the slope to a pollinator garden at the lower east end. Restoration of the hillside nurtures the long-term health of the surrounding forest. Planting design acknowledges climate change by utilizing species typical of Oregon and California and better adapted to hotter and dryer summers along with native plants. Trees removed for construction were saved as nurse logs to stabilize and provide habitat on the hillside.

Low Impact Development
Rain gardens and bio-filtration planters at the upper and lower-level building entries capture stormwater on site, filtering runoff before draining to the wetland system at the east end of campus. The system is a visible educational tool and maintains predevelopment levels of on site stormwater retention.

The landscape design maintains existing Bee Campus USA and Salmon-Safe certifications. The plant palette infills existing “bloom gaps” in the pollinator cycle—periods when there are not plants available to local pollinators. Artwork in four-story stair tells the pollinator story bringing natural cycles into the daily experience of students and faculty.

“[Innovation Hall] is a gamechanger for students at both of our institutions. Students and faculty… have increased opportunities and cutting-edge facilities to collaborate and create new knowledge as we continue our commitment to increasing opportunity, equity and inclusivity and building a larger, more diverse workforce of the future.” — Dr. Leslie Cornick, Dean UW Bothell School of STEM