PASADENA - Astronomers and astrophysicists will finally have a home together on the Caltech campus with the official opening Monday of a $50-million building on California Boulevard.
The 100,000-square-foot Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics provides a central location - with offices, classrooms and laboratories - for about 300 faculty and students who previously were spread out in five different locations around the campus.
Bringing students and professors from the two disciplines together under one roof will lead to breakthroughs in the fields, said Andrew Lang, chairman of Caltech's division of physics, mathematics and astronomy.
"The Cahill Center will, I predict, catalyze a new era for astrophysics," Lang said.
Plans for such a building were originally developed in the 1940s, but they only came to fruition after a large donation from benefactor Charles H. Cahill.
"We are very fortunate after 60 years to have this magnificent facility available to faculty and students," Caltech president Jean-Lou Chameau said at Monday's opening ceremony.
The idea for the building was a selling point that brought a high-profile professor to the campus more than 40 years ago, Chameau said.
"Caltech showed that it always fulfills its commitment to the faculty it hires," he joked.
Designed by Los Angeles-based architecture firm Morphosis, which is headed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne, the three-story building took 3 years to build.
Laboratories are housed in the basement, which can be accessed through an angular staircase near the entrance that winds up to the third floor. A 148-seat auditorium is on the first floor.
Open spaces and conference rooms are located throughout the building in an attempt to foster impromptu discussion among students and faculty.
"The notion of it was the encouragement of interaction," said Mayne, who added that he wanted to "attack the institutional nature of the building" by including informal meeting spots more conducive to Caltech's collaborative atmosphere.
The Cahill center will be the first Caltech building to be certified under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System. The building will be given a gold-level LEED distinction by the U.S. Green Building Council because of the reduced energy and water needs of the facility.
Experts in the fields of astronomy and astrophysics on hand for the opening will speak at a full day symposium, "The Future of Astrophysics," today in the Cahill Center auditorium.
nathan.mcintire@sgvn.com
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