Prairie View A&M Fabrication Design Center is a new facility for the School of Architecture. This is an innovative space that will house a variety of equipment allowing students to build, develop and test ideas. The building is divided into assembling space and equipment spaces. Students will be able to go to use multiple methods and equipment to build their work. This state of the art facility will house the latest technology in laser cutters, CNC routers, wood and metal tools as well as 3d printers. The intent is for the process of construction to be done in one location offering opportunities of peer to peer learning, collaboration and cross-disciplinary interaction.
The architecture looks to the prairie.
The Fabrication Center is conceived as an elevated plane that references the “prairie”. This plane hovers over the exterior brick walls allowing light to filter into the space. The brick exterior walls reference the extrusion of the plane by revealing the earth’s strata. The entrance, deeply recessed, creates covered outdoor gathering space, while the landscape embraces the building thus creating uncovered gathering space. The building is divided programmatically into three areas; shops, assembly and digital fabrication. As the visitor moves through the space, light monitors and clerestory windows offer illumination and connection to the sky. The interior walls of the assembly space become areas of display that students can display and learn from.
This is a new and exciting facility that will inspire architecture students and their work, not only by providing an unconventional model space, but also housing state of the art equipment.