Malachowsky Hall, University of Florida

In academia, as in the wider world, traditional lines of demarcation are becoming blurry. Departments may continue to defend their turf, but a university can save money and enhance its standing by creating shared facilities for different disciplines and encouraging formal collaboration along with the free exchange of ideas and research. The Gainesville campus of the University of Florida seized an opportunity to link computer research and the pressing needs of the healthcare industry, with the goal of becoming a global leader in data science and AI. The Philadelphia office of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson (BCJ) drew on their long experience of educational buildings to win a competition for the design of Malachowsky Hall for Data Science and Information Technology. It was named for the principal donor, Chris Malachowsky, an electrical engineer who co-founded Nvidia.

The client wanted a forward-looking, 24,600-sq. m building that stood out from its brick neighbors while respecting their scale, much like an earlier commission to Grimshaw. BCJ proposed a rectilinear, seven-story building on a former parking lot, oriented to reduce solar gain. By going high, they were able to landscape the surrounding space, and they exploited the sloping site to place entrances to north and south on different levels. These provide a pedestrian route from existing College of Engineering buildings to the heart of the campus. The building contains facilities for the Colleges of Medicine, Pharmacy and Engineering with shared break-out spaces on each level.

The big move was to clad the exterior in metal units composed of custom-folded, 1.8x2.3-m aluminum panels. These were developed in close association with the fabricator and proved to be a durable and economical way of shielding and animating the building. Fifteen hundred panels in three shapes can be rotated and used in different patterns, denser to the south and west, more open to the north and east. This imparts a dynamic,...

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