News Article

Two university clients. Two completely different programs. One shared engineering challenge: build spaces where every system has to work perfectly, or none of it does.

When Boston College and the University of Pennsylvania each set out to build next-generation immersive learning environments, they arrived at the same underlying problem from opposite directions: one needed a single space to support every kind of academic work at once, the other needed a room engineered to be acoustically invisible to its students while performing at broadcast quality for the world.

In both cases, the program was clear, but the path from vision to a functioning space ran through a dense overlap of acoustic, thermal, electrical, and connectivity demands where a failure in any one system would compromise the whole. AHA’s role was to find the coordinated path through that complexity and deliver finished spaces that perform exactly as promised.

At Boston College, the challenge was density. The new 3,800-square-foot Data and Visualization Immersion Lab had to support virtual reality stations, data visualization workstations, 3D modeling platforms, and media production suites running at the same time, every day, for students across every skill level.

AHA designed the mechanical, electrical, fire protection, and structured cabling systems to handle that concurrent load reliably. The cabling infrastructure in particular had to be built for flexibility, serving a wide range of technologies today while remaining adaptable as the program evolves.

At the University of Pennsylvania, the defining constraint was silence. Wharton’s new WAVE classroom (Wharton Academic Virtual Environment) was built to connect students across five global campuses in real time, with the instructor alone in the room and every student participating remotely through large-format displays and broadcast-grade audio and video.

To keep the project on schedule, AHA also developed procurement documentation early for equipment with long manufacturing lead times, a step that protected the construction timeline before it was ever at risk.

The WAVE classroom is open and connecting Wharton’s campuses in a way that standard video conferencing cannot match, with an experience for remote participants that is closer to being in the room than watching it from a screen.

The BC lab is currently under construction and designed to give students access to a range of professional-grade tools and technologies in a single, well-integrated space. In both cases, AHA’s job was to make sure the engineering never got in the way of what the spaces were built to do