The Commons sits between Fuld Hall, IAS’s original building designed by Jens Frederick Larson and completed in 1939, and, across a stream, the scholars’ housing, originally designed by Marcel Breuer in the mid-1950s. The two wings of rooms meet in the middle, where a low, wood-ceilinged bar is located whereas the outer spaces are open and airy, near the bar the interior tapers to a glassed connector only about 12 feet wide, evidence of skillful shaping of compression-and-release volumetrics. Enclosed with 49 precast concrete panels and topped with arcing roofs, the project’s tidy 17,000 square feet are spread over a main floor, a mezzanine, and an infrastructural basement. SHA has shaped the malleable program of meeting spaces-study desks, conference rooms, and a lecture hall, with connective zones for lounging and dining, linked by a cafe-into a sequence of light-filled pavilions. The building, which stages a set of handsome rooms across its sloping site, aims to be a salon of sorts, coaxing scholars (numbering nearly 300 this year across four schools: mathematics, historical studies, natural sciences, and social science) out of their individual thought bubbles into shared dialogue. Had the famous duo commuted today, they would’ve likely walked by-or through-the Rubenstein Commons, an addition to the campus completed late last fall by Steven Holl Architects ( SHA).
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