Greene Building, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
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The Greene Building is home of the School of Architecture at RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute). Named after Benjamin Franklin Greene, it has its own library and computer lab for exclusive use by the architecture students. The ground floor contains a gallery for students’ work and the lower two floors contain many workrooms, open most of the day for students to complete projects. The architecture library contains 30,000 books and 100,000-plus slides.[1]
The third-floor Studio 305 contains a milling machine which can carve three-dimensional objects out of foam or wood. Working in the opposite direction a scanner is able to create a computer-based image of physical objects.
In the studios, all furniture is on wheels allowing students arrange things in ways that best make sense for the job at hand. One of the largest rooms can be converted into a small theater where students can present their projects to teachers and peers, as well as create video presentations. Video editing stations also allow students to create simulated tours of their proposed buildings, or transpose images of their projects onto images of the proposed site.
[edit] History
The building was completed in 1931 at a cost of $400,000, shortly after the School of Architecture was founded. The building was named in memory of Benjamin Franklin Greene, Director of Rensselaer from 1847 to 1859. The names of fifteen of the most renowned deceased American architects were cut in stone above the second-story windows: Bulfinch, Burnham, Goodhue, Hooker, Hunt, Jefferson, Latrobe, McComb, McIntyre, McKim, Mills, Renwick, Richardson, Sullivan, and Upjohn.
