BIG completes "first built project in Los Angeles" at Claremont McKenna College

https://www.dezeen.com/2025/09/29/big-claremont-mckenna-college-richard-day-sciences-center/









Architecture studio BIG has completed a building at Claremont McKenna College in Los Angeles made of "a series of parallel building volumes side by side" that surrounds a central atrium. Commissioned in 2020, the Robert Day Sciences Center is located on the eastern side of the Claremont McKenna College Roberts campus and contains spaces, labs and classrooms dedicated to science education.













Although it is located just outside of the city of Los Angeles in Claremont, it is within Los Angeles County. The studio has dubbed it "BIG's first built project in Los Angeles" and is the first building completed as part of an overall BIG-designed master plan for the campus. The four-storey building is made up of four pairs of stacked rectangular volumes composed of steel trusses clad in textured, reinforced concrete. Each pair of volumes is rotated 45 degrees from the level below, while the interstitial space between them creates a multi-storey, glass-enclosed atrium at the centre, which serves as a social space according to BIG founder Bjarke Ingels.











"We imagined the Sciences Center as a series of parallel building volumes side by side – with a public space in between – that are rotated in all the same directions as the [campus] mall," said Ingels. "Even though each of the individual building volumes are rational, flexible, and capable of being computer labs or wet labs, the open atrium in between becomes a Piranesian social space where you can see fellow students, faculty, colleagues, and professors from every level."











Visitors can enter the building underneath the volumes' significant overhangs at three main points – in a subterranean, southwest corner, which leads to the building's ground level, or two opposing entrances on level one. A grand "social" staircase sits on the ground floor and leads up through the center of the building. Educational spaces, such as seminar rooms, classrooms, offices and labs line each rectangular volume.

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