To visit Building 337 on the Novartis campus in East Hanover, New Jersey, is to walk through it with awe, something akin to what visitors to Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Building must have felt a century ago.
It's not easy being an ugly office building in New Jersey. Drive down any suburban stretch and these dinosaurs from the 1980s languish on the roadside, lonely reminders of a time when builders thought everyone would want to work in suburbia forever.
At Princeton University's new Frick Chemistry Laboratory, dedicated in April, a highly efficient lighting scheme is one of several tightly integrated strategies that contribute to the building's ambitious energy-saving goals: Frick is designed to use 24 percent less site energy than allowed by the 2007 version of ASHRAE 90.1 standard. This building's configuration is a product of both environmental and programmatic goals, according to its architects, London-based Hopkins and Payette Associates of Boston. The 265,000-square-foot structure has two four-story, largely glass-enclosed wings'one on the east for research and another on the west for offices. The pieces are joined by a
A four-story, 239,992-square-foot building for Princeton University's chemistry department, with research and departmental labs and a 256-seat auditorium in the basement, teaching labs and a café on the ground floor, and research labs on the upper three floors.