Becton Dickinson Campus Center in Franklin Lakes, NJ, USA by RMJM

July 21st, 2010 - Posted in Architecture

Becton Dickinson Campus Center in Franklin Lakes, USA by RMJM

RMJM has designed the campus center at BD (Becton Dickinson and Company) located in Franklin Lakes, NJ, USA, This is a medical technology company that serves healthcare institutions, life science researchers, clinical laboratories, industry and general public, with 38.500 square foot facility that bridges and blurs the boundaries between the building / landscape , indoor / outdoor, roof / earth, figure / ground, and two local business culture management / production. Site design focused on sustainability and purity of open space between the main building, known as the “Great Lawn.” This building is designed to be both a virtual and literal bridge between two pre-existing AIA National Honor Award-winning buildings on the BD campus designed by Kallman McKinnell Wood in the late Eighties and early Nineties. The Howe Building, to the west, is the corporate headquarters and company’s executive administration building. The Becton Building, to the east, is home to a number of the company’s business units, researchers and production teams.

Becton Dickinson Campus Center in Franklin Lakes, NJ by RMJM

Campus Center is located in the “Great Lawn” between the two buildings and allow the two cultures to come together for the purpose of sharing food. This is to accommodate as many as 500 people and includes several places to eat, multi-station servery, kitchen, retail shops, coffee bar and cafes, banks, dry cleaners, and support area including loading dock and mechanical mezzanine level area. There are exterior dining terraces, and areas within the building that can be partitioned into intimate dining or meeting areas.

Interior Design Becton Dickinson Campus Center in Franklin Lakes, USA by RMJM

Becton Dickinson Campus Center by RMJM

Final design, which won the prestigious American Architecture Award from the Chicago Athenaeum in 2008, is a fusion of built structure and land form where the resultant architecture is well hidden and the landscape preserved. The finished floor is set at the lowest level of the Howe building (where the existing cafeteria is located) in order to allow the lawn to become a roof over the entire structure and connecting links. Folded concrete slabs create the horizontal planes and connect via steel structural columns that appear to sway. The building plan is given form through spatial volumes attached to the primary intersection of spline walls at the center. These primary walls define the program area and stretch beyond the building enclosure in their north-south axis to gracefully negotiate the changing grade. A total of 5246 cubic meters of concrete placed for the Campus Center. Self Consolidation of Concrete (SCC), more widely used in Europe but are used with increasing frequency in the U.S., more flowable than conventional concrete, but can be as cohesive and achieve the same durability and strength. SCC was chosen for the project because of design complications and the Campus Center to accommodate the vision of exposed concrete surfaces. The flowability increased SCC concrete formwork allowed to charge more complete, without segregation and with fewer cavities, and without any mechanical vibrations which can damage the surface shape.