University selects architect for sustainability center

Correction appended

As the University adapts its expansion efforts to the current economic environment, plans for the new Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment are proceeding on schedule: The University announced Wednesday that it has chosen Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects to design the new center.

Led by Tod Williams ’65 and his wife Billie Tsien, the firm will design plans and submit them in 2011, engineering school vice dean Pablo Debenedetti said in an interview. He said construction on the building should be completed by early 2014. He added the actual construction schedule will depend on the economy.

The New York-based company is known for designing the award-winning American Folk Art Museum in New York, which was completed in 2001, and a bioengineering laboratory at Penn that opened its doors in 2006.

The couple also designed Wilson College’s Feinberg Hall, which opened in 1986.

Plans for the center were announced last July when Gerhard Andlinger ’52, an international business executive, donated $100 million to the University. The gift was one of the largest single donations from an alumnus in the University’s history. Only two donations — a $100 million donation from Gordon Wu ’58 in 1995 and a $101 million donation from Peter Lewis ’55 in 2006 — have equaled or exceeded the Andlinger donation in size.

In an interview last fall with The Daily Princetonian, President Tilghman said the budget for constructing and funding the new center would be about $375 million.

Tilghman said at the time that she hoped to obtain the additional $275 million needed to construct and fund the program through additional fundraising, but she also said she plans to dedicate some of the University’s “unrestricted resources” — University funds that are not tied to any specific projects — to meet the goal.

The 110,000-square-foot Andlinger Laboratory will be located between the E-Quad and Bowen Hall. The new laboratory facilities will allow for cutting-edge research in areas like nanofabrication, photonics for combustion diagnostics, energy storage, remote sensing for environmental applications and solar-cell technology.

Research will emphasize energy efficiency and conservation, developing sustainable energy sources and new carbon-dioxide storing techniques to reduce emissions.

“We’re developing courses in topics of energy and development and trying to reach as broad a cross-section of Princeton undergraduates as possible,” said Debenedetti, who chairs a steering committee and a director-search committee for the center. He said the search committee is in the middle of interviewing candidates, though he declined to elaborate on the process.

While many projects on campus were discontinued or postponed due to the economic recession, the timeline for the center has not changed, Debenedetti said.

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Debenedetti noted that sustainability would be a main criterion for the development of the building blueprint, saying that the plan should minimize the building’s impact on the environment and teach the students and the community about environmental issues. He added that the design must be “consistent with the idea that this will be a research facility.”

The Andlinger Center will not constitute a new department in the engineering school. It will be an “inherently multidisciplinary effort” that will involve “every [engineering school] department at some level,” in addition to some departments outside the engineering school, Tilghman said in September.

The new positions created in the center will be “weighted towards junior faculty,” Tilghman said, to provide scientists earlier in their careers with research opportunities. “This is an area where we want to be supporting younger professors as well as established professors,” she explained.

Engineering school dean H. Vincent Poor GS ’77 said in an e-mail in September that he expects the Andlinger Center to integrate well into the engineering school. “The Andlinger center will play a major role in the school, in bringing together researchers and students from many areas of engineering and other disciplines with a common interest in energy and the environment.”

Poor emphasized that the proximity of the center to the E-Quad would make interaction easy.

“This energy and environment neighborhood will be connected to the E-Quad and will be readily accessible from our other buildings as well, which will make it relatively easy for faculty, students and staff to interact with the center and participate in the Center’s programs,” he said.

Andlinger came to Princeton in 1948 from his native Austria after winning a New York Herald Tribune essay contest at age 19. He served in the US. Army, pursued a long career as a business executive and is now the chairman of a private investment corporation.

Correction

An earlier version of this article omitted a comment from Debenedetti that the actual construction schedule will depend on the economy.