New Higgins Hall at Pratt Institute Completed

February 1, 2006

NEW YORK — F.J. Sciame Construction Co. has completed the new Higgins Hall building at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn . The $10 million project is the first building in New York designed by world-famous architect Steven Holl and project architect Timothy Bade, along with associate architect Rogers Marvel.

The Center Wing of Higgins Hall is a 26,000-square-foot building comprised of studio, classroom and auditorium space for the School of Architecture at Pratt Institute. The new building, which joins the existing north and south buildings of the architecture school, was developed on the foundations of a former structure destroyed by a fire more than a decade ago.

The Higgins Hall Center Section connects the North Wing and South Wing of Higgins Hall with passages and ramps at each level from the basement up through the fourth floor, and uses the themes of connectivity, transparency, and community to create a new identity for the 160-year-old New York City landmark. Pratt broke ground on the Center Section in April 2004 and construction was completed on time for the start of the fall 2005 semester.

Rogers Marvel Architects has won several awards for its previously completed renovations of Higgins Hall’s North and South wings and worked closely with Steven Holl Architects to ensure the design and construction of the Center Section were harmonious with its earlier work.

Holl’s design for the new building has been compared by industry insiders to a fine Swiss watch. Higgins Hall is more than just the new home for the architecture department. In fact, it was designed with the intention of becoming a teaching tool itself for the students who study there.

“With this in mind, it is quite likely to become an architectural landmark,” says Michael Porcelli, executive vice president of Sciame.

“One of the greatest challenges we faced was building an unusually detailed building for a competitive price,” says Porcelli. “Immediately after we were awarded this important assignment we had to eliminate 20 percent from the initial bids while maintaining the integrity of Steven Holl’s amazing design.”

Sciame was able to solve this problem by drawing on its knowledge of specialty sub-contractors who could collaborate in economically realizing the unique details in the project. The end result is a competitively priced building that retains the detailing of the original design.

The architect’s vision was of a building that integrated pre-cast concrete columns and beams with pre-cast floor planks and cast-in-place ramps, stairs and formed reveals. The disparate floor heights of the adjacent buildings are joined in the new structure in an area called the “dissonant zone,” a series of cast-in-place ramps integrating hollow core plank, pre-cast columns and beams and cast-in-place concrete, all of which are exposed to the street through a grouping of windows in the facade. The cores in the pre-cast floor planks were utilized as electrical chases to minimize exposed conduits, which necessitated a high degree of coordination between all the trades and the pre-cast concrete subcontractor before the planks were even fabricated.

Another complex system in the building’s construction was the curtain wall. Interestingly, the channel glass façade is split in two by a jigsaw-like lattice of steel supports and canted windows in the middle of the building.

Timothy Bade, associate at Steven Holl Architects, says, “‘Value Engineering’ is an ambiguous term since most contractor’s apply it by simply cutting out design or details. However, for our Pratt project, much of the value engineering was achieved through Sciame’s extra efforts in finding specialty sub-contractors who were excited by the challenges of the project and willing to work with us to economically achieve this unusual design.”