The Lewis Katz Building has won honours from the Society of American Registered Architects New York Council (SARA NY), the Society of American Registered Architects Pennsylvania Council (SARA PA) and Platinum rating from the College Designer Collabetition Awards for design excellence.
Completed in December 2008, the Lewis Katz Building spanning 114,000 square feet was designed to meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification requirements. The building features a glass enclosed law library with a reading room that overlooks Park Avenue, Beaver Stadium and the Arboretum at Penn State.
A 250-seat auditorium, a courtroom equipped with the latest in trial technology, four 75-person classrooms, seminar rooms, legal clinic and generous student study space are some other features of the building.
Richard Olcott of Ennead and lead design architect of the building stated that the architecture of the Lewis Katz Building draws from the idea that the law library is the theoretical and physical heart of the legal educational experience and the centre in which students spend most of their time. Based on this idea, the library is conceived as a floating element, sheltering the rest of the school’s program beneath. Since the law school had no previous presence on the University Park campus, the project had to create the law school’s public face and provide a forward-looking, sustainable, publicly accessible home.
SARA was founded in 1956 as a professional society that includes the participation of all architects, regardless of their roles in the building and designing industry. Both Pennsylvania and New York awarded the Penn State University Dickinson School of Law the 2010 Award of Merit. Collegedesigner.com announced the College Designer Collabetition Awards. It is the only website focused exclusively on promoting high-quality higher-education school design around the world.
