Academic

At VMDO we are dedicated to creating enduring and engaging academic environments for learning and research that encourage and support student and faculty engagement within and across curricula, campuses, and communities.

Whether designing for the sciences, humanities, business, engineering, fine arts, or other educational disciplines, we strive to make academic buildings that support and build strong academic communities, connect people to one another, and expand the knowledge and inquiry shared between people in those communities.

The design process begins with creating and reinforcing a building’s connections to the larger campus, landscape, and natural setting and carries inside to the design of generous community spaces that foster day-to-day interaction and encounters between students and faculty, which can be so fruitful for discovery and exchange. Along with these areas for congregation, we carefully consider and design circulation spaces such as corridors and stairs, so that these unscheduled places support learning outside the classroom.

For the design of academic instructional spaces, we couple a detailed understanding of the spectrum of learning environments and ongoing evolutions in them, with a delight in advancing learning space design through deep engagement with faculty and students. From the traditional lecture and seminar room, to the active learning classroom, to group study and informal learning spaces, and across specialized laboratory and technical instructional settings, we tailor solutions to support the teaching and learning approaches and evolutions appropriate to each institution.

At the same time that technology increasingly plays a larger role in the classroom and allows for transmission and exchange across distance and time, we endeavor to incorporate it in intuitive ways that support intentional interaction and celebrate the power of place in supporting deep and meaningful academic exchange and discovery.