Associated Architects - Cho Benn Holback + Associates, Inc.
Owner/Developer -Montgomery College
Contractor - Clark Construction Group, LLC
Photographer(s) -Patrick Ross Photography
Jury Comments
- This is a complicated program on a campus where achieving this level of quality project is not necessarily an easy thing to do. This project is commendable in the way in which it takes a very difficult program and develops an architectural language that is particular but clearly a part of the campus. The atrium is particularly successful in terms of creating both the joints of the existing buildings or linkage of the existing buildings but also creating a spatial figure in a building that is largely divided into cellular spaces. The architect was a very good steward of this project and kept the budget very tight and used extra money very carefully and in very targeted places where it received a lot of bang for the buck. Spaces that often times get very little attention paid to them (i.e. – corridors and research labs, offices) – are all handled with a nice restrained hand, a very rich palette of materials and colors, not rich in the sense of finance, but rich in the way in which they’ve chosen to use the material palette within the confines of what clearly is a limited budget.