A college in Massachusetts did not tear down the science center it had used for 50 years and then left empty. It kept the concrete of the bottom two floors, stacked two timber floors on top, and put a student center and a dining hall into one building.
1.On August 24, Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, opened the dining hall of its new student center first. The building is called the Ford Student Center. The whole building opened on September 18, and about 250 alumni came to the opening celebration.
2.Herzog & de Meuron designed it, with Sasaki as executive architect. It is the Swiss firm's first completed educational building in the United States. Gross floor area is about 13,400 m², a little over 4,000 pyeong, on four levels.
3.The site was the Merrill Science Center. Campbell, Aldrich & Nulty of Boston designed it, and it was built in 1968 for $7 million, one of the most modern science buildings in the country when it opened. In 2018 the college spent $200 million on a new science center elsewhere, and the 50-year-old building emptied out entirely.
4.What stayed was the post-tensioned concrete of levels 1 and 2. About two thirds of the columns were cut to a common height, and a timber transfer structure was laid on top to carry levels 3 and 4. The timber is black spruce glulam fabricated by Nordic Structures in Quebec. Irregular old concrete meets timber milled to the millimetre in a factory, and the two are joined with custom column capitals and puzzle-like steel connectors.
5.The mix of old and new changes floor by floor. Level 1 is 90% existing concrete, level 2 splits evenly between timber and old concrete, and levels 3 and 4 are entirely timber except for the stair and elevator cores. By the quantities the architects published, the building reuses 2.5 times as much concrete as it pours new.
6.In the ground-floor stair hall, the columns and ceiling poured in 1968 stand bare, without a coat of paint. Each floor up, the grey recedes and the wood takes over, until above the servery the ceiling turns into a grid of spruce beams. The facade is Western Red Cedar, lightly oiled on the upper floors to keep its color and stained nearly black below. In low sun, the architects say, those dark boards read as eggplant.
7.The dining hall seats 900, twice the capacity of Valentine Hall, the dining hall students used until now. There are 14 serving stations and small private rooms for groups of 8 to 10. No gas line was brought to the building at all, so the kitchen runs on electricity.
8.Much more went in besides the dining hall. A theater and event room, a game room, music practice rooms, the student radio station, interfaith space, an Alumni Pub for 90, and a third-floor café and terrace all share the building. At its center, a stepped space wrapped by a curved wall opens the floors above and below to each other.
9.When the college picked its architect in 2019, it framed one problem: students had no single place to come together. Keefe Campus Center, built in 1986, was small, and dining sat separately on the other side of campus. The new building straddles the slope between the upper campus lawn and a new green on the lower campus, so the path between classes runs through the building.
10.Enrollment was 1,907 in fall 2025. With 900 seats, that is one seat for roughly every two students. The dining hall is the one place every student visits three times a day, and placing club rooms, a café and a game room along that route is a way to keep students there after they eat. At the opening, one student said the building invites people to "stay, and linger, and socialize."
11.Two weeks after opening, the student paper's editorial led with complaints. Whole floors and hallways were still closed off, and a dining hall advertised as open until 9 p.m. was running out of food by 8:30. Valentine Hall, across campus, is now an empty building.
12.The college has not disclosed the total project cost. It has released two figures. Contracts with firms within 20 miles (about 32 km) total $90 million, and in June the family of Bill Ford, Class of 1983, gave $50 million. The gift named the building. Ford is chairman and CEO of General Atlantic.
13.The college's 2018 science center came in at $800 per square foot. Allow for construction inflation since then and a large commercial kitchen, and at $1,100 to $1,400 per square foot this building comes to $160 million to $200 million (estimate). In February 2023 the student paper reported the budget was a few percentage points over, and that trustees would decide in May whether to proceed.
14.The only money coming in is meal fees. The 2025-26 meal charge is $8,850 a year, so even if all 1,907 students pay it, the ceiling is $16.9 million a year (estimate). A college dining hall keeps almost nothing after food and labor. So who pays for the building? Gifts and the endowment.
15.The college counts its return elsewhere. By its own figures, reusing Merrill's foundations saved 440 tons of carbon, and timber instead of steel saved another 900. The new building also leaves homework: two buildings need new uses, Valentine Hall without its dining room and Keefe Campus Center, slated to become an academic building.
16.Amherst College kept the bottom two floors of a science center it had used for 50 years and left empty, added two timber floors, and gave its 1,907 students 900 dining seats and club space in one building. The reused concrete is 2.5 times the new. A Korean university trying the same thing would first hit fire rules. An assembly building of this size needs fire-rated main structure, and few products are certified with timber columns and beams left exposed. Cutting old columns to add new floors also means rechecking the seismic performance of what stays. Since meal fees cannot repay the construction, a donor's name has to come before the drawings.