Claremont McKenna College

“This gorgeous architecture amplifies and elevates a revolutionary vision for higher learning at a critical moment in the well-being of our species, our brains, our planet. We can no longer rely on siloed disciplines within the sciences or between the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities to meet the challenges and opportunities of our time. The Robert Day Sciences Center and Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences fuse facility and program, with multi-disciplinary expertise, problem-based learning, applied ethics, and higher human intelligence in an era of AI. Bjarke’s rotating stacks create opportunities to learn at the intersections. The wood fuels our social warmth. The glass cuts through the barriers. The beautiful finishes and spectacular public art inspire our humanism. This is a carved jewel for Claremont McKenna College. A gem for the ages.”

"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."

“Like a well-placed queen on the chessboard, the Robert Day Sciences Building unlocks new moves for the campus - extending the north mall, initiating a diagonal mall, and opening access to the east sports campus. Growing in parallel with our Los Angeles office, it has become a shared milestone - an architectural cornerstone for the campus and a testament to our team’s evolution as California architects.”