Empac from the outside

A term project revealed several issues associated with one of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s (RPI) newest buildings.  These include extremely over-budget building expenses, lack of student accessibility, and building location.

Research and Observations

After months of research, the major flaws in RPI's new building proved to be cost, location, and accessibility.  With its original $50 million dollar price tag eventually quadrupling, questions about RPI's financial status and debt accumulation rose.  In addition, the building's location - in the farthest corner of campus, away from student hubs - led to minimal interaction with the newly built structure.  The building is mainly accessible only to the few artists who come to use the space and rarely available to the student body.

emPAC BY THE NUMBERS:

Given the building was already in place during this project, there was no way to offer up construction design differences.  However, the team offered up changes in the student accessibility realm.   These include encouragement on student projects specifically at EMPAC.  Now, only a few grad students can do research but little to no undergrad students.  This would make students more involved, something that the students in the interviews (seen in the video below) wanted to see.  Another idea we had would be to rent out EMPAC which would bring in some money for RPI.  Clubs such as UPAC Cinema could host movie premiers, however, no food is allowed in EMPAC, so there would have to be strict rules about that.  From the interviews that we conducted, we also noticed that advertising needs to be more frequent and consistent which would hopefully attract more students to EMPAC and make it more of a social-hub.

This project was created in collaboration with several other students for Design, Culture and Society in Spring of 2015.