Butler Unveiled

For years the boxy brown brick buildings of Butler were the butt of many a campus joke, and Butlerites bonded over the waffle ceilings and buildings that many considered to be the blight of campus.

Now, two years after industrial cranes first showed up at the southern end of campus, the redesigned Butler College complex — the University’s third four-year residential college — has opened to 283 undergraduates this fall.

The redesign of Butler, which was first announced in 2003, sparked heated controversy among the alumni who had donated money for the old Butler buildings, which were razed to make way for the new ones.

Though administrators say the complex was designed to complement Princeton’s traditional collegiate gothic architecture, its style is distinctly modern. The new 113,000-square-foot complex — with 1967 Hall, three unnamed buildings and the part-upperclass-housing Wilf Hall — was designed to maximize space without sacrificing environmental sustainability.

Building A and 1967 Hall form three sides of West Courtyard while Building C, Building D and Wilf form three sides of the Butler College Memorial Courtyard.

Project manager Billy Zahn explained that the architects of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, the buildings’ designers, sought to keep the volume of the new Butler buildings the same as that of other dormitories throughout campus. None of the new dorms are more than four stories tall, consistent with the University’s older dorms.

Because of these height limitations, the architects designed common spaces in the basements, including the Studio ’34 convenience store, as well as several lounge areas and a secluded sunken courtyard.

The upper levels include 59 three-room quads, 82 singles, nine suites for college staff and affiliated faculty, six suites for RCAs, two suites for residential graduate students and a suite for a resident faculty member.

To save electricity in the ground-level common areas, the architects capitalized on natural light by creating ground-level courtyards and outfitting rooms with large windows.

The dorm room windows are also equipped with circuit breakers, which are designed to turn off the air conditioning when the window is open. Engineers did not include a similar breaker to stop the heating if the window was open to ensure that “students won’t freeze to death,” Zahn explained.

Some of the most striking energy-saving elements, though, are the buildings’ eco-friendly “green” roofs, which help to prevent overheating and thereby reduce the buildings’ cooling costs. The plants growing on the roof gardens don’t require special care and can be sufficiently sustained by regular rainfall.

The roofs will also serve as outdoor laboratories for ecology and evolutionary biology professor Eileen Zerba and the Princeton Environmental Institute.

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Only University Facilities staff are actually allowed on the roofs, but sensors placed on various parts of the roofs will collect data on their water retention, reflectivity and temperature, Zerba explained, also noting that collected data will be displayed in a designated space in the complex’ common area. She said she hopes the displays will encourage Butler residents to learn about their own buildings and their relation to the environment.

Butler may not feature the grandiose gothic architecture of older dorms, University Architect Ron McCoy GS ’80 said, but the goal of the planners to build the University’s new dorms in keeping with eco-friendly models has been “successful.”