by Heather Livingston
Associate Editor

Summary: The American University School of International Service (SIS) in Washington, D.C., considered it essential that its new academic facility embody its educational and civic ideals of promoting peace in the world, providing free access to information, harmonizing with the natural world, and enhancing human health. Created in 1958 to promote global thinking and service, the SIS is now the largest school of international relations in the country, if not the world, says SIS Dean Louis Goodman, PhD. Despite its growth from 80 to 3,000 students, the SIS today remains in its original facility with faculty and staff spread throughout the campus. To provide adequate and appropriate spaces for the school, the AU SIS hired William McDonough and Partners, with Quinn Evans Architects, to design its new 75,000-square-foot facility, centrally located on the main quadrangle at one of the city’s most well-traversed intersections.

Multiple design concepts
The new SIS held a ceremonial groundbreaking in November, with excavation expected to begin in January. Asks Project Manager Katherine Grove, AIA, William McDonough and Partners: “What would it mean for a building to wage peace? How many people’s lives will we touch by designing and constructing a building and what can we do to make that process as valuable as possible?”

To that end, social justice considerations were in full play during design. “The base purpose of the building, we feel, is to inspire our students, faculty, and alumni to try to build a better world and educate themselves to do that,” explains Goodman. “Since social justice is such an essential part of what we do, we thought about how we were evolving the building: whether it was to design teaching spaces so that there could be full engagement and interactions, making sure that the relations with labor were not exploitative, or making sure that the choices we made for materials weren’t the result of some inappropriate labor process.”

Transparency, literally and figuratively
Transparency was a key factor, Goodman says. In the current SIS building, the dean’s office is immediately on the left of the main building entrance, with a student coffee lounge to the right of the entrance and directly across from the dean’s office. In the new building, that layout will be recreated to produce an environment in which everyone in the SIS community knows where to find people at a glance. The central atrium, conceived as the heart of the new facility, provides a meeting place for students and staff, as well as space for presentations and impromptu gatherings.

An additional design consideration was the influence of Buckminster Fuller. Both McDonough and Goodman studied under Fuller and were familiar with his Dymaxion map of the world. “We had been talking with the school about ways of mapping the globe and ideas about how to make manifest the mission of the school in ways that are subtle and abstracted,” says Grove. “At one point in the process, we three came up with this idea of a copper band that will wrap the building. What was interesting to us is because it’s been triangulated, you can also rearrange pieces so that you maintain their literal global relationships, but you can start to understand countries and continents in different relationships to one another depending on how you unfold the globe.” Their idea of unfolding the globe to explore different relationships will be manifested as a contemporary equivalent of the historical frieze that often wrapped classical educational and cultural facilities.

Sustainable emphasis
Aiming for LEED™-Gold certification, the project is incorporating varied sustainable strategies. To limit energy consumption and lower heat gain, the building will have high-performance glazing, shading, and an optimized building envelope. The skylighted atrium will flood the interior spaces with daylight and reduce the need for artificial lighting. The design calls for high-efficiency HVAC, lighting, and appliances. Further, the university is considering mounting a solar array to reduce the facility’s carbon footprint. The facility will also harvest rainwater to minimize runoff and use of potable water with a 60,000 gallon cistern for toilet flushing. The water-saving scheme includes bio-retention, mulch filters, and using part of the roof as a garden.

Sustainable materials have been specified throughout the building. However, says Grove, designing for sustainability is much broader than just looking at materials. “It’s a philosophy that informs the way we design. As we’re looking at the design, we’re looking at the life cycle of the building itself, why we would choose one structural system versus another, understanding where that material comes from, and what happens with that material while it’s in a building, and eventually, a hundred to two-hundred years from now what happens to that material. Can it return back into a closed loop?”

“We talk about three legs of a sustainable triangle,” she says. “We talk about ecology or environmentalism. We talk about economy and financial health of an institution of a project. And we talk about equity and the social aspect of a project. In this case, because it is a school of international service and already a group of people who are intensely focused on those issues, it was an opportunity for us to notch up our game and our level of intelligence about those types of issues as they relate to the design and construction and implementation of the building project.”