Commendation Project name: Francis X. and Nancy Hursey Center for Advanced Engineering and Health Professions
Project overview: Completed in 2021, the 59,000-square-foot Hursey Center embodies the University of Hartford’s vision for a building that mixes cutting-edge, “skunkworks”-type spaces for contemporary engineering with the specialized simulation equipment and technology-rich learning environments of today’s health professions programs.
Combining engineering and the health sciences together in a new building anticipates a world wherein engineers design inventions, like prosthetics, that improve human health, and discoveries in tissue engineering and implants are directly integrated into nursing education and simulation. The Hursey Center is the physical embodiment of that vision, placing student projects and hands-on learning in a central, highly visible location within the campus.
Driven by the University’s desire to create a destination and activity hub in the center of its beautifully landscaped campus, the Hursey Center is sited prominently in the middle of the main academic green. This unconventional approach both gives the building symbolic meaning, consistent with the client’s project goals, and recalibrates the scale and form of the campus by improving its character, spatial structure and hierarchy.
The Hursey Center’s massing is deliberately quiet and subtle. Clad in grey polished porcelain panels, its taut surfaces reflect the sky and campus. Its “comprehensive” green roof combines the benefits of intensive and extensive green roof systems. In contrast, the interior environment is visually dynamic and complex. The building is organized around a multistory, skylit central space linking upper and lower level campus entrances—the “Street”—that was conceived of as an interior extension of the campus’s main pathway.
Project location: West Hartford, Connecticut
Firm name: PAYETTE
Architect of Record: PAYETTE
Completion: 2021
Client: University of Connecticut
Jury comments: For a building with no energy generation, the energy reduction percentage of over 50%, is impressive. There is great appreciation for the expression of the academic green in the green roof system, as well as for the adjacent landscaping, the navigation of the slope of the site, and the complementary understated wall-cladding. Together, they make a big deal of an ecological and aesthetic move, presenting a great and bold siting strategy.
