FCA was retained by the New School to provide programming and pre-design services through full documentation to adaptively reuse a Gold Coast mercantile building for their Innovation Center. Spatially, the Innovation Center is a flexible, technology enabled, but device independent, series of collaborative spaces. Programmatically its spaces and technology backbone must support pooled classroom uses in addition to a variety of mutually interdependent design, media and film related teaching, research and project activities.
Instruction and research may be highly discreet and/or integrated as required by the objectives of specific instruction and study. As part of a larger planning effort, this project is a unification of fragmented programs into an integrated digital learning lab for state-of-the-art delivery of curriculum. The Innovation Center enabled the University to respond to growing demand for digitally flipped classrooms and accompanying drop-in and instructional computer labs. Ancillary academic support spaces are intertwined into the facility, generating an environment that students and faculty develop an affinity for well beyond a pedestrian instructional facility.
