Penn State University: Engineering Design and Innovation (EDI) Building

Penn State is Pennsylvania’s largest public university, educating around 90,000 students every year. It’s a world-class institution that consistently ranks among the top universities in the world. Oh, and they’ve got a pretty good football team, too.

So when the university decided to reimagine the west quadrangle section of its main campus, it went big with its new, 105,000 sq. ft. Engineering Design and Innovation Building.

The building encompasses PSU’s School of Engineering Design and Innovation (SEDI), the Learning Factory, the Factory for Advanced Manufacturing Education (FAME) Lab, and electronics and 3D printing labs. It’s a single hub for research, making, testing, innovation, and prototyping.

Boston-based Payette architects took the lead on the design of the new building, which is tracking LEED Gold and uses a combination of brick, metal panel, limestone, granite, glass, and timber. The building houses flexible classrooms, multi-use design studios, high bay research labs, faculty offices and research cores.

But perhaps the building’s most striking feature is Unicel Architectural’s 8,000-plus square feet of THERM+ H-I 56 Structural Glazing (SG2) timber curtain wall (TCW).

The TCW features rich spruce-pine-fir (SPF) timber framing, 43′-6” continuous mullions, triple thermos glazing for increased insulation of temperature and sound, and copper anodized aluminum metal panels.

The TCW now acts as a ribbon of glass across the building’s entire east façade, bathing the building’s interior with soft morning light and displaying the learning and collaboration that takes place within the building every day.