This building aims to service the needs of the whole Van Leer scholarly community. Its upper two floors hold the postdoctoral fellows’ offices and seminar rooms, the two bottom levels - dug into the cliff - feature facilities for general campus use, and both sections contain multiple informal meeting spaces. Its facade facing the new central campus square is glazed; that facing the city is more opaque, offering a stone wall with prefabricated concrete units clad in Hebron limestone. The building also reinterprets the campus’s late-1960s’ historic buildings, incorporating their courtyard motif into its structure through a series of smaller internal courts, which assist natural ventilation, framed by stone trellises and recycled wooden louvres, which provide shading. Arguably its pre-eminent ecological feature, however, is its geothermal system of subterranean water pipes: 46 of them, each 135 metres in depth, can effectively countermand the effects of solar heating by introducing cooler, underground temperatures.
Source: Aga Khan Trust for Culture
