Marquez Hall School of Petroleum Engineering

Marquez Hall, home of Colorado School of Mines’ Petroleum Engineering Department, is a state-of-the-art laboratory, classroom, and academic office building that focuses on the energy industry’s shift from petroleum energy to renewables. Sited at the gateway for the new Earth Science Quad, the building supports on-going research and education while serving as a recruiting tool for future students. Science galleries, demonstration laboratories, and transparent simulation labs are integral spaces within the major public areas. As students move through the building, they are exposed to engineering by visually engaging a range of dynamic spaces.

The building is composed in an L-shaped plan that responds to the campus edges. One end of the building aligns with a prominent campus pedestrian walkway, the other defines a new courtyard activated by ground level transparency and interactive programming. Comprised of three bars of program, the design strikes a balance between accommodating the growing needs of the petroleum engineering program while enhancing the views afforded from the site of the surrounding mountains and bluffs. The northern bar holds a combination of laboratories, simulator rooms, and visualization classrooms. The southern bar houses office and support spaces.  The southeastern wing provides lecture halls, classrooms, and seminar rooms. Each grouping of programs is expressed on the façade by a series of glass curtain wall, aluminum plate, and terra cotta cladding.

The building’s lobby is notable for an entry and exhibition space contained by structurally glazed glass walls hung from a sixty-foot cantilevered roof, forming a liminal threshold as students travel along the campus thoroughfare that it gestures out towards.

In collaboration with Bohlin Cywinski Jackson