Set back by a plaza along Forbes Avenue, the building’s ground floor takes design nods from a thistle — the national flower of Scotland — which adorns the center of CMU’s seal that was created in 1967 at the merger of the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the Mellon Institute. This section of the building will be civic-minded, and house the new ICA and its expanded gallery space. High-performance concrete panels shift around the exterior, dynamically changing the look of the building depending on how it’s viewed, much like a thistle. The ground floor will contain a full-service restaurant on Forbes Avenue that will be open to campus and community patrons. In addition, the new building will add 400 classroom seats with priority toward MCS and SCS classes.

The building’s tower, which is seven stories tall, will contain labs, offices and other learning and collaborative spaces for MCS and SCS, as well as an underground parking garage with 130 spaces. This section’s design takes its inspiration from another central CMU symbol — the  tartan, a woven wool fabric with a plaid design that originated in Scotland, where each fabric’s unique pattern represented an individual family or clan.

The Hall of Sciences will augment the MCS ecosystem at Carnegie Mellon that spans the Mellon Institute, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center(opens in new window), and Wean and Doherty Halls.

“The Richard King Mellon Hall of Sciences will bring together some of the best Carnegie Mellon has to offer: the foundational sciences, computer science and the arts,” said Curtis A. Meyer(opens in new window), interim dean of MCS. “This building will be the interface where these disciplines and the community can come together to learn and collaborate.”