Tradeline: Boston University Builds One of the City’s Largest Sustainable and Operationally Fossil-Fuel-Free Buildings
Excerpt from Tradeline | By: Aaron Dalton | March 19, 2025 | Photo: Norm Li
The 350,000-sf Duan Family Center for Computing & Data Sciences at Boston University (BU) brings 3,000 students, faculty, and staff together daily inside a LEED platinum-certified 19-story structure that sits at the heart of the university’s main campus. By replacing most of the building’s Portland cement with other supplementary cementitious materials, installing triple-glazed windows and fins to reduce the solar load, and heating and cooling the building with geothermal boreholes paired with active chilled beams, the project team created one of the largest sustainable and operationally fossil-fuel-free buildings in Boston.
With a daring design that has been compared to a stack of books or a tower of Jenga blocks, the Duan Center was intended from the start to serve as a vertical campus that encourages interactions by blending open, shared gathering and meeting spaces with classrooms, laboratories, and collaborative research areas.
Although the building primarily accommodates the computer science, mathematics, and statistics departments, and the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, it also contains teaching spaces that are bookable by any BU department. As a result, it’s likely that “all students on campus will spend some time in this building,” according to Paulo Rocha, partner at KPMB Architects.
The Duan Center uses multiple strategies to reduce its environmental footprint. Renewable energy to power the building is sourced from a mix of on-campus solar plus off-campus wind. A high-performance building envelope, enhanced HVAC systems, heat recovery, and energy-efficient lighting all combine to minimize energy consumption by 30%.