From across the athletic fields and parking lots, the Robert Day Sciences Center can appear enormous and somewhat imposing, with its four levels of rectangular volumes stacked on top of one another, each rotated 45 degrees from the floor below.

But as I approach it, portions of that mass seem to peel away. Overhanging volumes create shade. Large openings pull me underneath the building. What initially read as a mountain of volumes, gradually becomes a collection of smaller spaces, entrances, and terraces. As I walk around, the architecture changes.

Completed in 2025, the 135,000-square-foot building is the new home of the Los Angeles area Claremont McKenna College’s Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences. Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, better known as BIG, it is also the firm’s first completed building in the Los Angeles area. And it certainly looks like a BIG building.

At first glance, the rotated forms seem like architectural gymnastics, contorting itself simply to make a spectacle out of itself. But there’s more logic behind it than appearances suggest.

Each level responds to a different part of the surrounding campus, while the ends of the volumes open toward views of the city of Claremont and the San Gabriel Mountains. Where one volume extends beyond another, the geometry creates outdoor space. Eight terraces are distributed around the building, turning what could have been leftover roof area into places for students to gather, study, and simply step outside.

The building also extends the organizing lines of Claremont College’s existing campus mall. Two primary entrances help connect the new science enter to the older campus while pointing toward the college’s future expansion to the east.

What appears most arbitrary from a distance begins to make sense once you walk around it. BIG has compared that experience to the process of scientific discovery itself–something that initially appears confusing gradually reveals an underlying order as you begin to understand it.

There was another detail that caught my attention as I got closer: the concrete.

The long structural edges of the building are expressed through enormous triangulated trusses, covered on the exterior with glass-fiber-reinforced concrete panels. Rather than giving those panels a perfectly smooth surface, they have a board-formed texture that preserves the appearance of wooden formwork.

It is a small detail, but an important one.

Board-formed concrete has a long history in modern architecture, particularly in buildings where architects wanted concrete to retain some evidence of how it was made. Here, that texture gives an otherwise highly contemporary building something tactile and imperfect. From a distance, the Sciences Center is about geometry. Up close, it becomes about texture, shadow, and material.

For a building designed by an large international practice, it also helps the architecture feel more at home beneath the Southern California sun.

If the exterior is defined by the separation of these enormous volumes, the interior is about bringing them back together.

The spaces left behind the rotating floors form a tall, skylit atrium running through the center of the building. From here, the geometry that appears somewhat mysterious outside suddenly becomes legible. Floors bridge across one another, classrooms and research spaces become visible through glass, and the individual pieces of the building begin to read as parts of a single composition.

The material palette changes as well.

Concrete remains outside, as the interior structural trusses are clad in warm Douglas fir. Wood, glass, and flashes of color soften the monumental geometry of the exterior. A broad staircase becomes informal seating, while classrooms, labs, and gathering spaces surround the building’s central circulation.

This may have been my favorite part of the building.

A science center could easily become a collection of sealed labs connected by anonymous corridors. Here, the architecture continually puts people, and science, on display. Moving through the atrium means looking across to another floor, down toward a gathering space, and outward toward the landscape.

The Robert Day Science Center is not a subtle piece of architecture, nor do I think it is trying to be.

BIG has created a building that announces itself as something new within Claremont Colleges. Its giant trusses and rotating volumes give it the kind of immediate visual identity that photographs particularly well.

But photographs also don’t quite explain it.