McCord Hall blog: Recent Episodes
Liz Farquhar
Podcasts about the design, construction and utilization of McCord Hall, an expansion of the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University that will house graduate business programs.
The south end of McCord Hall, closest to Lemon Street, was originally drawn as a cantilever – an unsupported overhang. But since the structure of McCord Hall is concrete the cantilever would have been expensive and difficult to pull off. So, the architects added columns to the plan – but not your ordinary plumb-straight columns. These columns are tilted. They were an eye-catching sight when they were being poured, and as they rose through four floors to the roof I became enchanted with them. In this podcast, Jerri Smith and David Ottavio, the lead architects from Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, talk about the columns and the role they play in the design.
Part Three: The university setting affected the design of McCord Hall as much as the climate. The site is bounded on the east and west by the athletic fields and the existing business buildings. The architects therefore needed to figure out how McCord Hall would relate to it all. Hear Jerri Smith and David Ottavio, lead architects from Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, discuss how their design both accommodates and enhances its site.
The Sonoran Desert climate played a big role in the design of McCord Hall, as architects Jerri Smith and David Ottavio of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates explain. Here they talk about the team’s careful consideration of the climate and the seasons when decisions were made about the placement of the building and design of stairways and corridors.
Part One: David Ottavio and Jerri Smith of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates lead the architectural design team for McCord Hall. While in Tempe for a site visit recently, we met to talk about the process of designing McCord Hall. KPF is an international firm that has designed a number of business schools around the country. They’ve been involved in the McCord Hall project from the beginning of the design phase, during which the location of the building shifted a couple times. Here’s David starting off, explaining how we ended up breaking ground just east of BAC.