At the corner of Rutgers University Livingston Campus—the institution’s youngest of five campuses in or near New Brunswick, New Jersey—rests a passive solar gem: the Rutgers Business Schoolbuilding at 100 Rockafeller Road in Piscataway. With splayed columns playfully propping up the upper curtainwalled corridor and a bottom corner that is seemingly split open, the structure greets students as an embodiment of the Livingston Campus’s vision: to be a model of sustainable and responsible community development and to serve as the gateway to the remaining Piscataway facilities.
The building’s interaction-focused design is the brainchild of renowned architect Enrique Norten. Although the project was completed in 2013, its beginnings stretch back eight years. In 2005, Rutgers University held a design competition for a new academic building, a new student facilities building, and significant landscape and transportation improvements to its colonial College Avenue Campus, located approximately three miles south of Livingston. Esteemed architects such as Thom Mayne, Peter Eisenman, and Antoine Predock participated, but it was Norten’s firm, TEN Arquitectos, alongside Philadelphia-based Wallace Roberts & Todd, that eventually came out on top.