Located adjacent to a plaza along Forbes Street, the ground floor of the building is inspired by the thistle — the national flower of Scotland — that adorns the center of the Carnegie Mellon University seal created in 1967 when the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the Mellon Institute merged. institute. This section of the building will be civic oriented, and will house the new ICA and its expanded exhibition space. High-performance concrete panels move around the exterior, dynamically changing the appearance of the building depending on how it is viewed, just like a thistle. The ground floor will feature a full-service restaurant on Forbes Street that will be open to campus and community patrons. Additionally, the new building will add 400 classroom seats with priority for MCS and SCS classes.
The building’s tower, seven stories tall, will contain laboratories, offices and other educational and collaborative spaces for MCS and SCS, as well as a 130-space underground parking garage. The design of this section is inspired by another central symbol of Carnegie Mellon University – tartan, a woolen fabric woven with a plaid design that originated in Scotland, where the unique pattern of each fabric represents an individual family or clan.
The Science Hall will enhance Carnegie Mellon’s MCS ecosystem that extends across the Mellon Institute, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center(Opens in a new window)Wayne and Doherty Halls.
“The Richard King Mellon Hall of Science will bring together some of the best that Carnegie Mellon University has to offer: basic sciences, computer sciences, and the arts. Curtis A. Mayer(Opens in a new window), interim dean of MCS. “This building will be the interface where these disciplines and the community can come together to learn and collaborate.“
