SHoP/Sharples Holden Pasquarelli is an emerging design firm with five partners whose education and experience encompass architecture, fine arts, structural engineering, finance, and business management. Partner William Sharples ‘89 took his first architectural design courses at Penn State while earning a degree in architectural engineering. He subsequently attended Columbia University, where he excelled in the Master’s of Architecture program and met the founding partners of SHoP. SHoP has a diverse project roster that includes a university academic building, a pedestrian bridge, a civic park, public art installations, a museum, retail shops, and mid-rise apartment buildings.

Shown here is SHoP’s first place winning competition entry for the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

SHoP’s proposal for the Building C Extension is centered around the creation of a new, urban, vertical “quad” that is open to all students 365 days per year. The design addresses the needs of students, faculty, and administration who need a space to meet, exchange ideas, and become a community. This new quad, or North Quad, is placed at the level of the fifth floor of the existing campus, the floor that has the greatest direct connectivity to the other buildings on the campus. A new, large-capacity, express escalator will bring faculty and students directly from the 27th Street South Quad to an open, planted, column-free garden floor that will be bathed in sunlight throughout the winter and shaded from the sun all summer long. The North Quad will sit above four floors of flexible classroom and studio space that will be fed from a single loaded corridor along the north façade.

The proposed addition is completed with a layered, woven wall that will contain the circulation between the classrooms, the quad, and the offices. This thickened façade allows many spatial possibilities and has review and exhibition spaces distributed throughout the building contained within its layers, all with natural northern light. This new façade is designed and constructed using methods of pattern-making, unfolding, stitching, and production that are the leading-edge technologies found in both the construction and fashion industries to create an affordable signature piece of architecture. The north-facing, dense, urban siting of the building provides a unique opportunity to integrate a sustainable, environmentally intelligent strategy as part of the overall design.