The Bello Center’s primary spaces are organized within a glass enclosed, double-height pavilion structure, which orients to the new campus quad. In the evening, the center radiates light and provides views into its facilities from the campus.

The library, which occupies a major portion of the building, provides for the introduction of state-of-the-art, electronic information services, classrooms and study rooms that formerly had not been available. It will also accommodate the growth of the library’s current collection of 140,000 items including books, bound journals, audio-visual materials and microfilm.

The other portion of the building is devoted to the Grand Hall entry rotunda and other spaces complementary to the library. The two-story entrance serves as a central campus meeting place, special events venue and exhibition center. The Grand Hall and the library both connect to a cybercafé, library classrooms and the Academic Center for Excellence, all of which remain open to students and offer study spaces and electronic access when the library is closed.

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Visitors enter the building through a portico adjacent to a reflecting pool and arrive in the main lobby and prefunction space. Both of the centers are classic rotunda forms. The larger Main Center seats approximately 250 people, with the smaller Meditation Center seating 40. While most of the building’s exterior is clad in limestone, the centers’ exterior walls are clad in brick, helping to articulate the spaces.

The Main Center is 30-feet-tall, its circular form extending above the building’s 16-foot-high roofline. The wood paneled seating space opens onto a rectangular sanctuary with a raised wood platform with a backdrop of a ceiling-to-floor water wall. Its large, curved entry pocket doors open onto the foyer, allowing the center to accommodate larger crowds for special holy day services and other occasions.

Throughout the facility, there is the contrast of curvilinear, rectangular and square forms. A square monitor roof tops the larger rotunda, with curved windows on each of its four sides bringing light into the space. An open porch to one side of the Main Center extends onto a terrace, creating a quiet outdoor campus room.

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The ability to experience these buildings, all within walking distance, presents a rare engagement. Designing a museum and academic building in this special historical and physical context was a unique opportunity.

Conceived as a contrapointal, abstract, ambiguously scaled, “sculptural object” on Elmwood Avenue (one of the city’s main thoroughfares), the composition rotates around a cast stone rotunda, to a modulated brick rectilinear volume, establishing a collage assemblage that interpretively relates to a multifaceted context.

The spatial sequence is intended to be dynamic, varied and unexpected, yet clearly referential to the exterior forms. The programmatic combination of exhibition and teaching spaces affords both an experiential richness and multi-use, that engenders vitality, as well as an inspirational sensibility that visionary architecture embodies.

Housing a museum dedicated to the art of Western New York, the 84,000 square foot two-story structure is a highly functional organization of related program components, clearly divided into public and private realms. Spaces include the dramatic 147-foot long double height main gallery, a variety of other flexible gallery spaces, an auditorium, classrooms, museum store, café, public reception room, administration, boardroom, roof terrace and support functions.

The building is clad in zinc panels, magnesium brick and cast stone, accentuating the formal articulation of the volumetric elements. The selected materiality is intended as both a counterpoint as well as a reference to the existing and nearby campus buildings as contextual precedents.

The first art museum in New York State to be LEED certified, and among the first several art museums in the nation to achieve certification, it has officially received LEED Silver certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. It meets rigorous standards in the areas of site sustainability, water use and efficiency, reduced use of energy and atmospheric impact, use of materials and resources, improved indoor air quality and innovation in design.

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Rising on the site of the current administration and student center, the new facility is smaller in both footprint and height than the 1970’s building it replaces. The sculptural solution will be an iconic structure that provides for the principal extracurricular and social elements of student life.

The Gwathmey Siegel Kaufman design locates these spaces – bookstore, dining, lounge, computer access, offices for student activities and conference meeting spaces – on three stories around a central atrium. The Euclid Avenue main entry leads directly into this skylit circulation and activity space which will also connect with campus pedestrian bridges, the main plaza and below grade parking.

The building’s three levels are organized as follows. Level one provides street level access to the atrium floor, bookstore, pub, and cyber lounge as well as to ramp circulation that leads to a redesigned outdoor plaza.

The second level contains the primary dining and food court areas as well as a convenience store and student senate office suite. It also provides direct access to the campus-wide interior walkway system.

On the third level are located a conference center, prefunction spaces, and the student life administration and office suite that includes interconnected lounge and conference rooms. There is also an outdoor terrace fronting Euclid Avenue.

The opening of the building in 2010 will coincide with the completion of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority’s Euclid Corridor Transportation Project. That project, which is being coordinated into the center’s entry plaza, reconstructs the Euclid Avenue right-of-way through the CSU campus. It calls for upgrading the sidewalks, lighting, and landscaping and enriching the connection between downtown and the university.

Associate Architect: Braun & Steidl

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The 130,000-square-foot building is a four-story linear structure. It houses administrative offices on the first three floors and the Landscape Architecture School on the fourth floor. Crowning the building is a barrel-vaulted studio space with double-height windows facing the quadrangle and a framed roof terrace facing Bailey Plaza.

A connecting bridge provides access to the Landscape department from the Academic building and frames a three-story gate to the quadrangle that recalls similar college gates on the campus. A primary pedestrian pathway from the quadrangle to the campus, the gate forms one of the main entrances to the Academic building; the other is at the corner of Tower Road and Garden Avenue.

The archway divides the building into two wings: Roberts Hall, an administration building that encloses the quad, and Kennedy Hall, a classroom and faculty office building whose south end faces a major intersection.

A two-story galleria with a balcony mezzanine is the primary interior circulation space of Kennedy Hall, connecting the two entrances and providing access to classrooms, a 600-seat lecture auditorium, and a 400-seat dining facility. The third and fourth floors house faculty offices and teaching-support space.

On the exterior, modular brick in three shades of earth tones recalls the texture of adjacent campus buildings. The windows are teak, with cast-stone sills and copings, and the barrel-vaulted roof in standing-seam lead-coated copper.

The four-story building addresses the pertinent issues of a major college structure—context, material, scale, and image—in a manner that supports both a new program and the traditions of the school.

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The building is the largest structure on the engineering campus and is connected to two older buildings in the quad by an elevated pedestrian walkway and underground tunnel. The generic office space on the lower floors provides valuable “swing space” for future college relocation projects. The design responds to severe site constraints by presenting a new gateway to the campus as well as establishing a referential architectural image for the entire university.

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The three basketball courts merge to form a single exhibition court when the two-tiered bleachers are extended. A continuous balcony surrounds the arena at the upper-bleacher level. At one end, an alumni lounge overlooks the court through a bay window; at the other end are coaches’ offices. The cage is a large, naturally lit multipurpose sports practice space that includes a climbing wall for teaching and training.

The lobby is the organizational fulcrum of the building, linking the office-service areas with the main athletic spaces and providing an interconnecting public entrance to the hockey rink. Unlike the traditional campus model, this architecture clearly articulates the interior volumes that define the spatial and organizational hierarchy.

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The ground floor of the new facility houses a 2,200-seat, intercollegiate basketball arena that is reconfigureable as three regulation basketball courts, a physical fitness center and classroom, varsity locker rooms, athletic ticket offices and a concession area.

The second floor, reached by two stairs and a bridge from the renovated Alumni Gymnasium, houses seven competition squash courts, six racquetball courts, a dance studio and bleacher balconies for spectators. The facilities are accessed from a barrel-vaulted, skylighted gallery, culminating in a bay window overlooking the entry.

Horizontal and vertical circulation elements wrap around the three sides of the basketball arena, allowing natural light into the fitness center and dance studio. The choice of exterior materials addresses contextual constraints and articulates internal volumes as well as the layered organization of the plan.

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