SWBR Architects projects honored at Rochester AIA award ceremony

Rochester, NY SWBR Architects was recently recognized at Rochester’s chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) at the 2016 Design Excellence Awards. The annual ceremony honors excellence and achievement in design, sustainability and innovation. Two of SWBR’s higher-education projects were recognized: Bailey Hall at SUNY Geneseo and Crothers Science & Nursing Center at Roberts Wesleyan College. The firm served as project architect for both facilities.

SWBR Architects, with input from SUNY at Geneseo and the State University Construction Fund, designed a renovation to Bailey Hall that radically reconfigured this former “hard” sciences building into a social sciences center facing the campus’ formal College Green. The $23 million project was completed in two years and was LEED Silver Certified by USGBC in 2015.

The building opened in 1965 as the Bailey science building housing physical sciences such as chemistry, biology and physics. But when the college’s Integrated Science Center opened in 2006, the physical sciences moved there, allowing the college to begin the Bailey Hall renovation. The result is a larger, more energy-efficient building containing modern classrooms, offices and laboratory space.

Roberts Wesleyan College’s Crothers Science & Nursing Center is a 44,000 s/f, two-story facility that houses first-rate educational facilities for science and nursing education for the college.

The new building features classrooms, advanced simulation laboratories and an experimental greenhouse. The lifelike patient simulators have realistic features — such as blinking eyes, pulses, and breathing, heart and lung sounds — that respond to nursing students’ practices. The new teaching facility is complete with advanced instrumentation and scientific equipment, modern teaching laboratories, several specialized labs, and dedicated research space in biology, chemistry and forensic science.