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Its “new axis” is therefore practical rather than rhetorical. Bridges lift people into neighboring buildings, a 44-foot carbon-fiber stair orb marks the gateway, and an open, daylit interior puts flexible work space beside two floors of laboratories. The building also houses LTU’s Marburger STEM Center, while connecting to the separate Science and Engineering buildings around it.
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What the Taubman Complex is—and what the “new axis” means
The formal name is the A. Alfred Taubman Engineering, Architecture, and Life Sciences Complex. It is one building on the Lawrence Technological University (LTU) campus, not a renaming of the adjacent Science and Engineering buildings. LTU’s 2025–26 Graduate Catalog describes the complex as opening in fall 2016 and providing facilities for robotics, science and biomedical engineering, as well as space for multidisciplinary student collaboration.
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The Danish Architecture Center’s project description and a 2016 Building Design + Construction feature explain the organizing idea: the project was intended to improve connections among disciplines and between existing and future parts of campus. That is the basis for calling it a new axis. The axis is a sequence of physical links—a framed entrance, a central circulation feature and elevated bridges—not an abstract line drawn across a site.
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On a campus where departments can otherwise operate in separate buildings, the complex makes movement visible. A student can enter through the marked gateway, see activity in the shared interior and continue toward neighboring facilities without treating each building as an isolated destination. The arrangement gives the quad a new edge and a clearer route through it.
How the plan puts collaboration beside specialized work
Two laboratory floors around an open center
The project’s laboratories occupy two floors and overlook an open flex area. This arrangement keeps specialized work close to a space that can change with the academic program. The catalog identifies robotics, science and biomedical engineering laboratories among the building’s facilities; the visual and spatial strategy allows those activities to be read as part of a larger learning environment rather than hidden behind a sequence of closed corridors.
“Overlook” matters operationally. It gives people in the central area visual contact with the laboratory levels while preserving the separation that laboratory work requires. The plan can support a class moving between demonstration, discussion and practical work without making every activity depend on one fixed room.
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The open area includes a reconfigurable hall for meetings and lectures. Furniture and layouts can be changed for a lecture, a group review, a student gathering or a collaborative session. That flexibility is a long-term asset for a university building: room capacity and teaching formats can evolve without rebuilding the basic shell.
The central space is not simply leftover circulation. It is the social and academic hinge between the laboratories, the entrance and the bridges. Its placement lets the building accommodate people who are not using a laboratory at that moment—visitors, faculty from another discipline or students meeting for a project—while keeping the building’s STEM identity legible.
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The carbon-fiber orb makes arrival and circulation part of the architecture
The most recognizable element is a 44-foot-high carbon-fiber circulation orb. It contains the main staircase and marks the entrance, rising above a reflecting pool. Rather than placing the stair in a conventional enclosed shaft, the design turns vertical movement into the building’s first public signal.
Circular skylights admit daylight into the orb, and translucent stair floors carry that light through the stair sequence. A person approaching the building can read where to enter; a person inside can understand the route upward. The stair is both wayfinding device and architectural event, helping the building function as a gateway to the campus axis.
The orb also supplies a counterpoint to the rectilinear laboratory floors. Laboratories demand regular planning, services and controlled adjacencies. The spherical circulation volume announces the public, connective role of the complex before visitors reach those more disciplined workspaces.
Bridges turn a single building into a campus connection
Lifted bridges connect the Taubman Complex to neighboring buildings. They are the clearest physical evidence that the project was designed as campus infrastructure, not only as a self-contained laboratory building. The links allow movement between facilities at an elevated level and reinforce the project’s role as a gateway and a new campus axis.
Those bridges also change how the quad is experienced. A route that once ended at the edge of one building can continue through the complex and into another. From the ground, the bridges frame views and signal that the buildings belong to a connected system. From inside, they make the neighboring facilities part of the daily visual field.
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The connections are especially important for a multidisciplinary program. Robotics, science and biomedical engineering may require different equipment and teaching environments, but their users can share meeting space and move between buildings without losing contact with the wider campus. The architecture supports that overlap without claiming that the departments have become one program.
Daylight strategy: clerestories, ETFE and translucent surfaces
Daylight reaches the central interior through clerestory glazing and an ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) scrim. The scrim diffuses light rather than presenting the interior with an undifferentiated glass wall, helping the open flex area read as a luminous shared volume.
In the orb, circular skylights and translucent stair floors continue that strategy vertically. Light is not confined to perimeter rooms; it follows the circulation route and gives the main stair a recognizable presence throughout the day.
This combination of controlled diffusion and visible movement supports the building’s social purpose. The design does not rely on a single transparent façade to make activity visible. Instead, it layers clerestory light, the ETFE scrim, the skylit orb and the open central area so that laboratories, circulation and gathering space remain visually related.
Expansion was designed into the concept, not confirmed as a later phase
The project was conceived as an expandable section. Building Design + Construction describes an “extruable section,” while the Danish Architecture Center uses “extrudable section” for the same design concept. In practical terms, the initial building was intended to establish a repeatable logic that could be extended as the university’s needs changed.
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That language describes design intent, not a documented completed expansion. Possible subsequent phases were discussed in the project account, but the available project information does not establish that those phases were built. The distinction matters when evaluating the complex: its value includes the ability to accommodate change, while its reported size and cost describe the building delivered in 2016.
An expandable approach can reduce the risk of treating a university program as permanent. Laboratory disciplines, equipment and enrollment change faster than a conventional academic building is replaced. A repeatable structural and planning idea gives the campus a way to grow while preserving the original axis and connections.
Project facts and delivery team
| Item | Reported information | Qualification |
|---|---|---|
| Building | A. Alfred Taubman Engineering, Architecture, and Life Sciences Complex | LTU complex that houses the Marburger STEM Center and connects to neighboring Science and Engineering buildings |
| Opening | Fall 2016 | LTU’s 2025–26 Graduate Catalog uses this institutional description; Building Design + Construction reported August 2016 |
| Area | 36,700 square feet | Reported by Building Design + Construction in 2016 |
| Cost | $16.9 million | Reported by Building Design + Construction in 2016 for the complex |
| Signature circulation element | 44-foot-high carbon-fiber orb | Contains the main stair and rises above a reflecting pool, according to the 2016 feature |
| Design direction | Thom Mayne, Design Director, Morphosis | Role identified in Building Design + Construction’s project account |
| Architect and engineer of record | Albert Kahn Associates | Identified in the 2016 feature |
| Civil engineering consultant | Professional Engineering Association | Identified in the 2016 feature |
| Geotechnical advice | Mannick & Smith Group | Identified in the 2016 feature |
| Broader campaign context | More than $125 million raised | Campus expansion and renovation campaign figure; it is not the cost or funding total for this building alone |
The figures in the table should be read with their dates and sources attached. The $16.9 million and 36,700-square-foot figures come from the December 8, 2016 Building Design + Construction feature, while the opening description is aligned here with LTU’s later catalog.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to read the building as a STEM facility
It makes adjacency visible
Many science buildings concentrate on technical performance: service zones, equipment clearances, safety separations and reliable environmental control. Those requirements remain essential here, but the Taubman Complex adds a public spatial layer. The laboratories face an open area; the stair is exposed as a destination; bridges reveal relationships to other buildings. The result makes adjacency—the fact that disciplines share a campus—something occupants can see and use.
It separates flexibility from laboratory control
The reconfigurable hall provides a changing environment without asking laboratory rooms to perform every teaching and event function. This is a useful planning distinction. Controlled spaces can remain organized around their technical needs while the central hall absorbs changes in class size, event type and collaboration pattern.
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It treats circulation as an academic asset
The orb and bridges make circulation more than a code-required route from one room to another. The main stair creates a shared vertical path, and the bridges extend that path beyond the building envelope. In a multidisciplinary university, encounters on those routes can be as important as the destination rooms because they connect people who may not share a department.
What the complex does not establish
The available project accounts support the design intent, program and reported 2016 metrics, but they do not establish every later performance outcome. In particular, Building Design + Construction said the project was “shooting for LEED Silver certification.” That wording records a target, not an awarded certification. No confirmed LEED award should therefore be inferred from the project description alone.
Likewise, the “extrudable section” concept should not be presented as proof of a completed second phase. It explains how the building was intended to accommodate future growth. The documented project remains the fall-2016 complex with its laboratories, flex area, orb and bridges.
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The building’s strongest lesson is organizational. A STEM facility can anchor a campus when its plan solves more than the problem of fitting laboratories onto a site. At LTU, the complex gathers technical rooms around a shared interior, puts the main stair on display, and carries people to neighboring buildings on lifted bridges. Those decisions make the building a connector in three dimensions.
Its gateway role also gives the quad a recognizable threshold. The reflecting pool and carbon-fiber orb establish a point of arrival; the bridges establish continuation; the flexible hall establishes a place to pause, meet and teach. Together, they turn a laboratory project into a piece of campus structure.
For architects and university planners, the project offers four concrete criteria for judging a similar intervention:
- Campus connection: Does the building provide usable links to existing and potential future facilities?
- Visible circulation: Can occupants understand where to enter, move vertically and continue toward neighboring buildings?
- Laboratory adjacency: Are specialized rooms close enough to shared collaboration space to support multidisciplinary work?
- Change capacity: Can flexible rooms and an expandable planning logic respond to future academic programs without erasing the original campus route?
The Taubman Complex addresses each criterion through a specific physical move rather than a slogan. That is why its new axis is best understood as a working campus route: a sequence of spaces and bridges that joins STEM activity to the rest of Lawrence Technological University.
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