NKU science building wins

Architects reward design done by Lexington firm

BY HOWARD MCEWEN | ENQUIRER CONTRIBUTOR

November 20, 2006

 

IMAGE:  The NKU science building.

Provided

 

BOONE COUNTY - The Kentucky Society of Architects, a chapter of the American Institute of Architects, has awarded NKU's Dorothy Westerman Herrmann Natural Science Center a Merit Award for Excellence in Architectural Design. The $38 million, 172,000-square-foot building was designed by Lexington's Omni Architects. The building houses the biology, chemistry, physics and geology departments.

 

http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061120/NEWS0103/611200363/1058/NEWS01

Here is a little larger image of the bldg....what do you all think??

I think it represents everything wrong with modernist architecture, hardly appropriate for a maximum security prison, much less a place for learning.

 

To each his own, though.

There must have been some real crap built in Kentucky this past year.

NKU has a great site.  Too bad the buildings there all suck.  This one might be a bit better than the ones I remember, but I cant tell if this is the front or rear facades.  I need to see more of the building before makiing a judgement, particulary the interiors....

Where is the door? What a cheap-looking pile of cold crap.

 

When I get tired of red bricks and Georgian architecture, all I'll have to do is take a look at this thread.

There must have been some real crap built in Kentucky this past year.

 

:laugh: ....just wait until MP rolls around!!! :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

hmm, i like the colors, but iu'd have liked them better in their day which was the early nineties. the design itself is a sort of fussy, decorative minimalism. looks like they bolted screens over a concrete slab building.

I've heard several people say that campus looks like a prison, now I see why. I like the part of the building on the left, that's about it.

From the A/E firms wesbite, I think this is the front, and it works better in articulating the entry (though they could have done better with the rear, would have been easy to do via a canopy or something)

 

 

I can see they are doing some play with figure-ground relatonships, and I like how the firestaris are big windowed spaces, not the usual CMU utilitarian stuff one sees.

 

Side facade.  Ok, this essentially a bar building, with different slabs sliding past each other.  I like what they were trying to do, but they got too fussy, I think, with the facade.  The metal skin being pulled back, ok, but the angles on the skin seem arbitrary and a nod to "decon", which is not the esthetic source for this building....

 

 

...i do like that they didn't default to band windows, but tried to be a bit more "different" with the fenestration.    The base works fairly well (good that they acknowledge the ground plain), but whats up with that upper level and the big "window" up there?  Seems like this was a real miss in how they dealt with that.

 

I like the interior.....utilitarian, but spacious, really more about space than volume

 

 

 

...and now for something compeletly different, one of their buildings at UofL

 

 

(proving they can do a good facade if they wanted to)

 

Omni Architects

 

hmm, i like the colors, but iu'd have liked them better in their day which was the early nineties. the design itself is a sort of fussy, decorative minimalism. looks like they bolted screens over a concrete slab building.

 

You need to go earlier than the 90s for the influences.  The designers where influenced more by the The New York Five, and also by the Texas Rangers (no not the sports team).

 

I think if they would have avoided the decon fillips to jazz up the facade, they could have had a more honest building and stayed trueer to the design intenetions..but id love to see what this building is like in real life, as I suspect, given what I think are the influences, the interior spaces and the parti are whats really the key parts here.  We tend to get distracted by the voumetrics and facade details, when this approach to architecture is more about space, secton, and plan.

^ sure, but by early nineties i was just referring to the coloration not the design. i was very glad to see other angles posted of it, but even the front view, which is the best view, is crude. jeff you are really going a long way for a building that is not worth this kind of discussion, it's not very good. worst of all, if the campus is otherwise csu prison-like as some said, this sure did not help them to break out of that.

jeff you are really going a long way for a building that is not worth this kind of discussion,

 

Excuse me? 

aw i just meant it's not good. it's just another ugly 'modern' college building misfire, unfortunately typical of every college. there is better to be seen and discussed around the campus, no? i'd like to know more about this one instead:

 

 

ok maybe we've seen this conservative style before too somewhat, but at least it breaks the campus out of a bunker mentality that people are complaining about, unlike the new science building. what is it for?

 

 

Oh, i was just wondering why you would question taking a fairly major campus building seriously...i was trying to look at it more from a architectural design POV.

 

ok maybe we've seen this conservative style before too somewhat, but at least it breaks the campus out of a bunker mentality that people are complaining about, unlike the new science building. what is it for?

 

Than building I think is some sort of research faclity, but its on the UofL campus, I think, not NKU. U of L is done up mostly in brick, including the modern buildings on campus.

 

 

 

 

 

^ my bad i thought that was nku too.

 

i took a look at some campus pics...i like the new power plant!  :clap:

 

 

 

The power plant looks better than the award winner.  What a pile of crap.  The building is totally anti-human.

 

The power plant looks better than the award winner.  What a pile of crap.  The building is totally anti-human.

 

The truth has been spoken!!!

^Agreed.

 

The building at UofL is neat as well.

The building at UofL is neat as well.

 

What are you talking about!?!?!?

Does the NKU president own a cement company?

The building at UofL is neat as well.

 

What are you talking about!?!?!?

 

Are you literally asking what I'm talking about, or are you disagreeing?

^literally...what are you talking about??  I don't remember UofL coming up once in this thread :wtf:

^Uh...Jeff mentioned it.

Ah...haaa :lol:  I'm not sure how I missed that but anywho....that bldg (at UofL) is quite typical, and I'm not sure how it challenges anyones mind (isn't that often times the point of significant architecture).  With that said the bldg at NKU does not challege the mind either.

With that said the bldg at NKU does not challege the mind either.

I don't think it takes much to challenge the mind at a Kentuckian institution...

I said it was neat...but looking at it closely, I'm not a fan of how the entrances are hidden underneathe an uninviniting, dark walkway/recess. I don't know why significant architecture has to "challenge the mind," for me it just simply needs to make a statement. Contemporary architecture seems to want to make a statement that has never been made before, create the extreme, think outside the literal box, but I'd just prefer the same old grand, quality designs of yesterday. Modern designs are always going to have their place, but I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon to embrace them, I don't care to be called stupid, ignorant, closed-minded, uncreative, etc, but I'll never believe that hideous buildings like that above, the Museum Plaza, Knowlton Hall, Duke Energy Center, Columbus Convention Center, etc, etc, are good architecture, they will always be utter crap in my mind. CAC is all that bad however, but I probably only like that because of its urban context.

 

 

Its impossible to have a serious discussion here on these buildings, or anything related to Kentucky for that matter, good or bad, becuase of this "becuase its in Kentucky, it sucks" attitude.