Polsky Building — Bringing Backpacks to Main Street

The concept connects High Street to Main Street with a vibrant cascading path that links public destinations, campus program spaces, and common spaces to combine the two, and gives all of these “front doors and porches” on this interior way. This is not to deny the adjacent University Avenue, which also connects High to Main, but instead to reinforce the avenue as the University’s main town thoroughfare by means of several points of contact between inside and out. The goal is to have “Backpacks on Main Street”.

Inside are spaces to support 600 faculty and 2,000 students with technology, arts and performance spaces, collaborative spaces, and spaces for student-led innovation and entrepreneurship. This first phase of work anticipates the eventual renovation of the whole, to link more interior spaces, an internal atrium, and the roof.