Ballinger’s Design Approach to Interdisciplinary Buildings Featured in Tradeline Report

Can architecture create a culture of collaboration? Tradeline’s recent article “Transforming Organizational Culture through Building Design” explores the goals and challenges faced by Dr. Peter Gillies, Founding Director of the New Jersey Institute for Food, Nutrition and Health (IFNH) at Rutgers University, as he launched the Institute and imagined an open environment that would foster such a culture.

Ballinger’s approach to interdisciplinary facility design fosters cross-discipline collaborations and emergent outcomes. Our design for the New Jersey Institute for Food, Nutrition and Health, opened in July 2015, reflects the ambitious goal of the barrier-breaking Institute: connect a wide range of disciplines to solve the childhood obesity epidemic. Co-located within the building are a student health clinic, a human performance lab, a nutrition research center, a healthy eating courtyard and a pre-school, as well as wet and dry labs, workspaces and outreach meeting spaces. An open stair integrates the building vertically and features New Jersey’s largest indoor living wall.

The article, based on a conference talk given by Ballinger Senior Principals Jeffrey S. French, FAIA and Craig S. Spangler, AIA, along with Dr. Gillies, also examines convergent environments at the University of Wisconsin and George Washington University, whose characteristics of transparency and visual access informed some of the IFNH design strategies.

Link to Article