At the new gateway to the campus of the Rochester Institute of Technology, you won’t see any robotics or engineering feats on display. Instead, the 180,000-square-foot Student Hall for Exploration and Development offers views into two nearly transparent cubes. In one, actors rehearse a theater performance; students are practicing their moves in a dance studio in the other.
Enter the $120 million building and notice that the theater, cheek-by-jowl with glass-walled maker spaces, looks into a crescent-shaped atrium. The workshops display a dizzying array of benches and machine tools umbilicaled to the ceiling by electrical cords and exhaust hoods. Garage-style doors open up and out of the way, inviting anyone passing by to check out the projects being invented and iterated within.
