Gallery
Description
Ave Maria University, the first all-new Catholic university to be established in the United States in half a century, is set on 750 acres of a 4,000-acre town development near Naples, Florida. The 5,000-student residential university was developed simultaneously with the town of Ave Maria, whose projected long-range population is 40,000. The campus consists of 12 individual buildings, totaling more than one million sf, which includes undergraduate housing, a science/class building, library and a student union. A 1,100-seat Oratory is both the spiritual and physical center of the community.
Site and structures are designed in response to the university’s founder and principal benefactor’s advocacy for the principles of Frank Lloyd Wright. Architecturally, each building evokes the horizontality and humanism of Wright’s work. Gently sloping roofs sheathed in copper meet at horizontal datums consistent across the campus, ensuring uniformity of the whole, yet the scale and massing of individual buildings is deliberately modulated to reflect their specific programs and to articulate a distinct sense of place.