Steven Holl Selected for New Princeton Building

The New York-based firm is already in the midst of realizing one building on the Princeton University campus: the Lewis Center for the Arts, set to be completed in 2017. With the IAS, they bested MOS Architects, OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture, and Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects in the small invited competition.

According to an announcement from Holl's office: "The Institute — where Albert Einstein worked from 1933 until his death in 1955 — has received funding for the building from businessman and philanthropist David Rubenstein, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of The Carlyle Group. At approximately 20,000 sf, the new Rubenstein Commons will be at the center of the IAS campus, providing a new forum that encourages interactions among the Institute’s diverse community of scholars."

The Rubenstein Commons will be "sited along a major pedestrian route near the center of the academic campus," per the announcement. Further, "The Rubenstein Commons will support community and academic life on the IAS campus, promoting communication and collaboration through a variety of social and meeting spaces. Providing a communal and flexible gathering place for the Institute’s research community, the building will offer a space for the display of images and materials that tell the story of the Institute’s heritage, extraordinary scholarly community, as well as current and future efforts."

Details of the design are fairly schematic, since the announcement from Holl's office – and the New York Times article that came out the same day – was accompanied by only two of his distinctive watercolor sketches. These reveal a curved copper roof, an intertwining of building and landscape, the use of prismatic glass, horizontal wood surfaces, and slender steel structure. 

No timeline was indicated for the 20,000-square-foot project.