Herzog & de Meuron has completed the Student Center & Dining Commons at Amherst College in Massachusetts, stacking new mass-timber levels on the concrete foundations of a demolished 1960s brutalist building.

The Swiss studio expanded the structure from 80,000 to 120,000 square feet (7,432 to 11,148 square metres) to house a combined student centre and dining hall. The building rises from the skeleton of the Merrill Science Center, a brick building designed in the 1960s by Boston firm Campbell, Aldrich and Nulty. The adjacent McGuire building was demolished to open up the site.

"Although it was originally adjacent to the quad, its position became increasingly obstructive over time," said the studio. "From the outset, the aim was to avoid repeating this condition and create a more open, modest building in dialogue with the campus."

The reuse strategy was driven by Amherst College's carbon neutrality goals. Because the existing foundation already handled the slope from the quad down to the greenspace, the studio kept two lower-level foundations and added two levels above.

The upper levels are clad in lightly oiled Western Red Cedar. The lower levels carry cedar stained almost completely black — a tone the studio calls "eggplant" — creating a gradation from dark to light along the slope and highlighting the upper-level additions. Deep eaves provide solar shading and shelter the outdoor areas on the third and fourth levels.

Mass-timber structural columns attach to the pre-existing concrete columns through a split-beam and corbel connection at the second level, making the building a hybrid timber-concrete structure below. The third and fourth levels are almost entirely mass timber, derived from Canadian Black Spruce.

A rooftop social area sits above the third level, holding a series of low-lying pavilion structures. These contain a black-box theatre and a variety of religious spaces. An atrium on the top level draws light down through a circular opening, while the third level holds study and event spaces and a glass-hemmed winter garden courtyard.

The primary entrance sits on the third level, aligned with the upper quad. A central hallway descends with the slope to a first-level entrance at the green space, passing through a circular opening cut into the third level's concrete floor plate. A further cutaway between the first and second levels, glazed above the main passageway, opens views into the dining area.

Dining functions occupy the first two levels, with the social hallway leading into larger lobby spaces. Wood details, including a gridded ceiling treatment, appear on the second level; concrete remains exposed elsewhere, mostly on the first level, which also contains a mailroom and a pub clad in the same dark timber as the lower exterior.

The studio claims a 33 per cent reduction in embodied carbon compared to a similar building of its size and type, and a 93 per cent reduction in operational carbon — the latter partly enabled by solar panel arrays on the fourth-level pavilions.

"The project links the site's history to Amherst College's future — creating communal spaces for student life and wellbeing and pursuing climate action as a shared priority," said Herzog & de Meuron associate partner Christoph Röttinger.

The building marks Herzog & de Meuron's first completed educational project in the United States. The studio recently finished the Calder Gardens art museum in Philadelphia and, alongside EHDD, is converting the former Birkenstock campus in California into a design museum for the Eames Institute. Photography is by Iwan Baan.