Vassar College – Main Building Renovations
Poughkeepsie, NY
AJA Architecture provided architectural and structural services to Vassar College for the renovation of the historic Main Building, a 5-story, 197,000 sq. ft building on the Vassar campus, originally constructed in 1865.
When Vassar first opened in 1865, Main Building housed almost the entire college –student, faculty, and administrator housing, the library, classrooms, laboratories, the art gallery, and the dining hall. Now a National Historic Landmark, Main building is the hub for campus life. Currently, the first 2 floors of the building house administrative offices (the office of residence life among others) while the upper floors provide rooms to accommodate 351 students.
AJA was hired by Vassar to work with the college, Resident Life Staff, and local buildings & codes to do extensive renovations & repairs to the upper levels of Main Building. This included coordination with a Structural engineer for structural renovations as well as coordination with a MEP+F team to do design-build work and finally working with an interior designer to breathe new life into outdated spaces.
AJA constructed a set of plans for a multiphase design-build approach to renovating the upper floors of Main Building. The scope of the project was to repair and refinish existing dorm rooms, refinish existing hallways, and renovate the student restrooms. Restrooms were a full renovation with new layouts to accommodate ADA accessibility, increase privacy with zero-sightline partitions and bathroom entry vestibules, and provide better lighting and ventilation. The dorm rooms received new lighting, new finishes, and new FF&E. The Hallway scope included new finishes, new light fixtures, and select door replacements. In addition to this scope, there were rooms in the 5th-floor towers that had been sitting idle for the past decade. With a careful code review, work with the local building codes inspector and an application for a state variance on the egress windows, AJA was able to work with Vassar to make the Tower rooms available for the Fall 2020 semester.
