NASA Glenn gets a stylish, space-age community centerpiece thanks to GSA’s Design Excellence program - commentary

The two-story building encompasses 60,000 square feet of office, meeting, and collaborative workspaces, plus a large, glassy, light-washed communal dining area. The project cost $44.1 million, including the demolition of an office building that previously occupied the site.

The building’s principal façade, which faces west toward the road, is surfaced with narrow vertical panels of glass separated by 10-inch aluminum fins designed to function as a vast sunshade, a service they very effectively perform. Other facades are sheathed in corrugated or smooth aluminum panels and narrow vertical windows that give the building a clean, simple, efficient look.

That intersecting point is surrounded by a low, circular steel bench, which brings to mind the orbits of celestial bodies. A glass staircase reaches down diagonally from the belly of the cafeteria, like a retractable component.Inside, the building’s offices are awash in daylight distributed through “borrowed” light from facade windows that filters through layers of workspaces, or skylights surmounting two-story, glass-enclosed light wells interspersed between “neighborhoods” of cubicle clusters.

Aaron Hill, a principal at Bialosky, said that NASA has realized that it’s competing for top-notch graduates of science and engineering programs “who may want to go work for Elon Musk, SpaceX. Tesla, Apple, or Facebook.’’ Those companies, he said, are “all built around this culture of collaboration and the excitement of sharing of ideas.”

After seeking proposals in 2012, the NASA Glenn project drew responses from architects including the Cleveland firm headed by the late Richard Fleischman, who died in 2020 at age 91. The project’s design was finished before it could have been affected by former president Trump’s 2020 executive order establishing a preference that all federal buildings should be designed in the classical style. President Biden voided that order in 2021.Along with its unfussy modernist aesthetic, the building embodies NASA Glenn’s ethic of sustainability. The project recently earned a Gold rating from the U.S.

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