Update on Trinity’s New Building Project

Dear Members of the Trinity Community:

I am pleased to provide you with an update on Trinity College’s new building project.

Over the last few months, our architectural team – Mecanoo in partnership with RHDA – has spent a great deal of time at Trinity, assessing our needs, exploring our campus, and talking with members of the Trinity community. Our need for space to better support our existing student population is acute—in addition to creating residential space to allow more students to live on campus, the growth of our programs means that we also require teaching and learning space. Following a comprehensive review of our site, they have developed an approach that is responsive to our historic campus, to the connections between our buildings and landscape, and to how we use our spaces.

Their evolving design is a lower-profile structure closer to the scale of our historic buildings than the mid-rise building that was presented for our development application. The new vision anticipates a low-rise T-shape footprint beginning at the west edge of the parking lot and extending along the north edge of the backfield. Re-integrating the North Field into the heart of campus life–something our students identified as a key aspiration during consultations—enables us to create open green spaces that can be used for a variety of activities and for play (as you may know, the field has been fenced and locked for well over a decade making it largely inaccessible to the college community). The T-structure will include a new north-south axis, with access points and pathways to better connect the new building with the rest of campus.

As you know, Trinity College aims to be a leader in sustainability. Mecanoo’s approach gives us great scope to integrate sustainability innovations and offers extensive rooftops for solar panels and urban farming as well as other opportunities to be a ‘living lab’. This design also creates wonderful spaces to bring the community together around food, whether through urban farming on the rooftop or in the new community kitchen that will serve as a hub for all students. The goal is to unite the entire Trinity campus, putting human wellbeing and a sense of community first with a more accessible, welcoming and walkable campus.

Over the last few months, we have been evaluating this approach through a wide variety of preliminary consultations with key constituencies. The results have been extremely positive. In the coming months, we will be engaging in further consultations in order to refine the design and move forward the process to build the spaces that we so desperately need at the College.

Trinity has always been about how our shared values, expressed in architecture new and old, can inspire and foster the flourishing of every member of this very special collegiate community. This new building will be a vital addition to our amazing campus and supporting it will be a central ambition of our Living Trinity Campaign. Together with strategic investments to support students and enhance programming, this ambitious new building will extend what we can do and show what is possible, positioning Trinity College at the vanguard of global higher education. I am excited by our journey ahead and what it will mean for our wonderful college.

Mayo Moran
Provost and Vice-Chancellor

Categories: Campus Updates; Living Trinity