Cool Hunting

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center recently opened its new innovative 220,000-square-foot laboratory at its campus in Troy, NY. Designed by British architecture firm, Grimshaw, the building is home to a 1,200-seat concert hall, a 400-seat theater with a full fly tower, an audio and video production suite, artists-in-residence studios and a dance studio. Equally as amazing is the architecture itself, like the hull of curved cedar planks wrapping the concert hall. Posing as an architectural challenge, the incredibly steep hillside location chosen for the hall was instead used to the design team's advantage by placing the entrance at the highest elevated point, allowing for seven discrete levels of the central atrium.

Founded by the nation's oldest technological university, EMPAC's cutting-edge facility will foster creative opportunities and research on the overlapping realms of science, art, and technology on a whole new level.