ROBERT DAY SCIENCES CENTER ADVANCES COMPUTATIONAL GENE, BRAIN, AND CLIMATE RESEARCH AT CLAREMONT MCKENNA COLLEGE

The Robert Day Sciences Center is now welcoming students, professors, staff, and visitors at Claremont McKenna College – one of the nation’s top liberal arts colleges. The 135,000-sq-ft building is designed to maximize multidisciplinary integration and interaction, with each level oriented in a different direction, channeling the flow of people and ideas between the labs, classrooms, and surrounding campus. Commissioned in 2020, the center is BIG’s first built project in Los Angeles and the first completed building in the BIG-designed masterplan for CMC’s Roberts Campus, which envisions a more unified campus shaped by a series of buildings that extend the central mall and adjacent sports bowl. Collaborators on the Sciences Center include Saiful Bouquet as Structural Engineer, KPRS Construction as General Contractor, and IDS Real Estate Group as Construction Manager. “The Robert Day Sciences Center brings together computer science, data science, and life sciences in one integrated environment. As the first completed building of our master plan for Claremont McKenna, it extends the north mall into a zigzag of malls, becoming a distributor of flows for the entire campus. We imagined the Sciences Center as a series of parallel building volumes side by side – with a public space in between – that are rotated in all the same directions as the mall. Even though each of the individual building volumes are rational, flexible, and capable of being computer labs or wet labs, the open atrium in between becomes a Piranesian social space where you can see fellow students, faculty, colleagues, and professors from every level. So even if you spend most of your time in a wet lab, computer lab, or classroom, there will still be many opportunities for sparks to fly between you and your fellow students, stimulating the exchange of ideas across the traditional silos of knowledge. In that sense, the Robert Day Sciences Center becomes a crucible where all of the different kinds of knowledge and all of the different kinds of students and teachers come together in one complex, three-dimensional learning environment.” – Bjarke Ingels, Founder & Creative Director, BIG