Robert Day Sciences Center, Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, California

Each floor of the Robert Day Sciences Center is turned 45 degrees from the one below it, and that one move drove most of the construction headaches. The 135,000-square-foot science building at Claremont McKenna College, designed by Bjarke Ingels Group and built by KPRS Construction Services, received an Award of Merit in Higher Education/Research in ENR’s 2026 West Best Projects, published Oct. 26, 2026.

It opened in September 2025 as home to the college’s Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences, which organizes its teaching around health, brain and planet.

Project Scope

The three-story building has two parallel wings framed by wood-clad trusses. Rotating the levels creates a slab-to-roof atrium in the middle and cantilevers on every side, and a central social staircase ties the floors together. Glass-walled classrooms and labs let people look into the science from the corridors and the quad.

The program packs in a microscopy suite, an EEG suite, an NMR lab and a high-performance computing cluster for neuroscience, genomics and computational work. There’s also a café, eight green roof terraces and about 11,000 square feet of photovoltaic panels, rated at roughly 342 MWh a year. The project is pursuing LEED Gold.

The material counts are big for a three-story building: 66,000 square feet of wood cladding, 50,000 square feet of glass and 2,150 tons of steel. Inside, Douglas fir clads the trusses, and the curtain wall uses glass-fiber-reinforced concrete cast in rough-hewn timber molds so it reads like the wood.

Saiful Bouquet was structural engineer, Atlas Civil Design did civil, and IDS Real Estate Group served as construction manager. ACCO Engineered Systems handled MEP, Rosendin covered electrical and fire protection, WSP consulted on MEP and LEED, Jacobs did land planning and Arup consulted on acoustics and IT. KPRS broke ground in October 2022.

Why It Matters

Those cantilevers came from Vierendeel trusses weighing up to 91,000 pounds, set with synchronized tandem crane lifts. The site’s soils were poor and inconsistent, so a standard crane setup couldn’t carry two crawlers working together. The team engineered crane mat systems sized off soil-capacity calculations, then ran the lifts beside public roads with lane closures, haul routes and California Highway Patrol support.

That’s the part worth studying. Signature academic buildings keep getting more sculptural, and the structure usually gets more expensive to erect than to design. Here the risk sat in the ground and in the rigging plan, not the steel order. KPRS turned a design that could have stalled on its first big pick into a delivered building, and that’s what the jury rewarded.

Project Team & Details