As adjunct professors at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Architecture and principals at Pittsburgh-based Davis Gardner Gannon Pope Architecture, Jeff Davis and Kevin Gannon know a thing or two about wall systems, even ones not commonly used in the U.S. So when it came time to design the four-story, 260,000-sf Collaborative Innovation Center at Carnegie Mellon, home to nearly 400 employees from private companies and university departments, Davis and Gannon knew exactly which exterior wall system to pull from their knowledge bank—they had taught about it for years but had never had the opportunity to use it. The architects specified a terra cotta rainscreen— developed in Europe but slow in its introduction to the U.S.—to cover more than half of the surface area of the building's enclosure.
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