Stone’s Green Look on Campus
While the interior is full of features that meet the special needs of Lawrence and its students, both Hagee and Stein say there wasn’t a lot of discussion when it came to the building’s exterior look, given the material that’s been used since the institution’s founding in 1849.
“Most of the campus is limestone, including the buildings that date back to the mid-1800s,” says Hagee. “We wanted something that fit in to the campus, and at the same time was a tour-de-force in its own way.”
Click photo to enlarge“They told us they wanted a contemporary, environmentally responsible building, so right off we knew we had to use materials from within a 500-mile radius of the site,” says Stein. “Traditionally, Lawrence also has a great deal of Lannon stone and limestone buildings so that led us to choose a natural limestone.”
JUST INCREDIBLE
As with a project of this complexity, however, it’s not surprising that the approximately 26,000 ft² of limestone used on the job wasn’t simply out-of-the-box.
Eric Swanlund, senior project manager for Boldt, says his firm had been involved with Lawrence officials on the campus center since it first popped up on the school’s radar.
“We’ve done a lot of their work over the past several years, and we were brought in to help determine the constructability of this project and help them site the building,” Swanlund says. “Later, when the decision was made to go ahead, we got the job as a negotiated project.”
He adds that soon after the designers determined that the new building would be limestone, Boldt began working with Fond du Lac Stone, a limestone quarrier/fabricator located approximately 30 miles south of Appleton in Fond du Lac, Wis.
“Most of the buildings on campus are Wisconsin limestone products, and Fond du Lac Stone has done a couple, as have some of their competitors,” Swanlund says. “The designers wanted stone, but they weren’t sure what kind of texture or what different products they wanted, so we toured Fond du Lac’s facility and looked at their different products.”
Lawrence students were also involved in the selection of a preferred limestone for the project, thanks to an early mock-up done at the behest of university officials.
“We picked out two different kinds of limestone – one that had more ochre in it and one that was more gray,” the school’s Hagee explains. “Then, we had it set two ways. In one the limestone was set in small horizontal pieces, almost like a Roman brick. The other was done with bigger pieces. We had a pizza party and asked the students which they liked best. They also picked out the color for the anodized aluminum that went into the framing of many of the building’s features.”
Hagee says the students’ choice of the stone with more ochre and the larger pieces is evidenced in the center’s façade.
