There's a new $12 million building going up in Mister Rogers' Latrobe neighborhood, and an archabbot, college president, and architect yesterday unveiled the plans and identified the winner of a year-long design competition.

Bob Donaldson, Post-Gazette Students gather around a model of the Fred Rogers Center following the announcement by St. Vincent College that Pittsburgh architects Davis Gardner Gannon Pope would design the $12 million building that will house the Fred M. Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children's Media, and the new St. Vincent College Conference Center and Exhibition Hall. Click photo for larger image.

The new Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children's Media will be a two-level complex of red brick, wood beams, and glass at a newly designed entrance to the St. Vincent College campus.

The design makes use of environmentally friendly "green building" technology, and its sloped roofs and sunny, open spaces are meant to harmonize with St. Vincent Archabbey Basilica and other historic buildings nearby.

The winning firm is Pittsburgh-based Davis Gardner Gannon Pope Architecture, whose recent projects include Duquesne University's law school, the Collaborative Innovation Center at Carnegie Mellon University, and a new headquarters for WYEP-FM.

Construction starts in June, said college President James Will, and the building should be completed in 2008. The 40,000-square-foot structure will house archives, offices, and exhibition areas for the Fred Rogers Center, an institution for the study of television and childhood development begun by the late children's television pioneer and Latrobe native known to generations as "Mister Rogers."

Other areas will house a conference center, patios, a library, banquet area for up to 300 people, and display and storage for the McCarl coverlet collection, St. Vincent's latest bequest.

"It will be a bright, warm, intimate place, but with lots of open space," architect Kevin Gannon said. "It's like what they do here at St. Vincent -- hospitality and warmth and openness is part of their calling."

"We're not moving a lot of dirt to make room for this building. It doesn't manipulate the natural landscape," architect Jeff Davis added. "The other buildings on campus will look out over this one, so we had to make the roofs interesting, too. They do metal roofs here, and these are grayish metal, set in different planes that will be pleasing to view."

The design is flexible, Mr. Gannon said, as the building has to evolve along with the institution that uses it. Accommodation will be made for media researchers, business seminars, busloads of children, and wedding parties.

St. Vincent has for years been striving to reconfigure state Route 1045, a busy two-lane road that bisects the campus. The new plan will relocate the road, enclosing the campus and allaying safety concerns.

The Rogers Center will be the first structure to greet visitors in the reconfigured campus entry, Mr. Will said.

"Aside from the basilica, which everyone sees from everywhere, this will be our public face," he said. "It's so important to us, for so many reasons."

Funding comes from the Heinz Endowments, the R.K. Mellon Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program, as well as smaller donors.

Mr. Will said 16 architectural firms competed for the commission, from as far away as Los Angeles and Boston.