A New Campus Hub That Fuses Arts and Tech Education

At the new gateway to the campus of the Rochester Institute of Technology, you won’t see any robotics or engineering feats on display. Instead, the 180,000-square-foot Student Hall for Exploration and Development offers views into two nearly transparent cubes. In one, actors rehearse a theater performance; students are practicing their moves in a dance studio in the other.

Enter the $120 million building and notice that the theater, cheek-by-jowl with glass-walled maker spaces, looks into a crescent-shaped atrium. The workshops display a dizzying array of benches and machine tools umbilicaled to the ceiling by electrical cords and exhaust hoods. Garage-style doors open up and out of the way, inviting anyone passing by to check out the projects being invented and iterated within.

The SHED, which opened recently at RIT’s campus in suburban Rochester, New York, is just the latest example of a higher-ed design trend: facilities that seek to foster creativity, collaboration and idea generation via an unusually intimate intermingling of arts exploration and hands-on science. Even as college students crowd into business courses and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields as schools scale back their humanities offerings, RIT is among several institutions that are using ambitious architecture to juxtapose if not merge the artistic and the technical as a means of delivering a more well-rounded education.

Placing performing arts facilities so close to tech-project spaces encourages a unique kind of cross-fertilization. For a play presented in the Glass Box Theater called Ada and the Engine, fourth-year mechanical engineering major Catherine Hampp used the SHED’s 3D printing technology to build a stage version of Charles Babbage’s 1832 calculating device, a precursor of today’s computers. The textile lab can aid customers of theatrical productions, then turn to the task of crafting headgear that can comfortably support devices that allow facial and eye movements to control a wheelchair. These are refined by student researchers in the co-located electronics lab.

Read More: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-04-20/rochester-institute-of-technology-s-120-million-shed-fuses-arts-and-tech?srnd=citylab