Ira Fay has long been a fan of puzzles and games. After all, the Hampshire College professor has been designing his own games for years.
Fay, who teaches computer science and game design at Hampshire, has turned that interest to public effect in the newest building on the Amherst campus, the R. W. Kern Center, a multipurpose structure designed to exacting green-building standards, such as using materials primarily from local and regional sources.
Fay’s contributions? He designed 10 puzzles that are now a permanent part of the building’s architecture and decor — embedded in the walls, on the ceiling, the floors and even the underside of a staircase.
From a collection of seemingly random letters to a series of black lines of varied thickness that resemble a giant barcode, these brain twisters, Fay says, are designed to entertain visitors and to speak to the theme of creating sustainable buildings like the Kern Center.
“I love puzzles, and I really like this building,” Fay said in a telephone call from his home in New Haven, Connecticut, where he was on sabbatical this past fall. “This seemed like a good opportunity to add another dimension to the building and give people a challenge.”
The Kern Center, which opened in spring 2016, has several classrooms, a student lounge and a coffee bar, the college’s admissions and financial aid offices as well as gallery space. School officials also call it “a living laboratory” for continued studies of green-building systems and related disciplines; through recycling and efficiency, it is a net-zero user of water and energy.
When construction of the building began in 2015, school officials invited input from the campus community on what they’d like to see in the structure. Fay, who’s taught at Hampshire since 2013, suggested embedded puzzles. He was inspired in part by a New York Times article he’d read about a luxury New York apartment that included clues for a treasure hunt designed by the architect for the family living there.
And Fay also cast his net wide in designing his riddles, soliciting ideas and themes from students, colleagues and others, including teachers and children in a pre-school class in the college’s Early Learning Center.
“It was absolutely a collaborative effort,” he said, one that involved the building contractors as well, as they actually put the puzzle markings in place. “And we have a whole set of puzzles — math puzzles, an art puzzle, a written-word puzzle, one on science … it’s a good reflection of the diversity of the campus.”
Walk into the Kern Center’s central lobby and you can see one of the most striking of these puzzles straightaway. On the underside of a staircase going up to the second floor, each step is emblazoned with a single letter, mostly consonants, with a few vowels.
In a classroom down a hall to the left, another group of letters and symbols, like a heart, is scattered on a section of wall between two windows. And a line of narrow silver pipes, on the ceiling of another room, is affixed with red brackets in a strange, seemingly random pattern.
Don’t look to Fay give away the secrets on what those brackets mean or what kind of code the letters are in. He does, however, have a link (www.irafay.com/kern) on his personal website where you can find a photo of the puzzle in question and a few hints at what you might be looking for.
Fay has used parts of the periodic table of elements for one puzzle, while another relies on perspective shifts for visual art. Above all, he says, he wanted the puzzles to be visually interesting, like the slender inlay in a section of wood floor upstairs; about three feet long and a couple inches wide, it consists of short and long rectangles of different tones.
“One of the challenges in putting together puzzles or a treasure hunt is to find the right level of complexity,” he said. “You want it to appeal to a broad audience, so it can’t be too simple or too hard.”
He says some people have contacted him by email to tell him they believe they’ve solved some of the riddles. The answers to the first nine puzzles are needed to solve the 10th one, he notes, and all of the answers themselves pertain to the Kern Center’s basic theme of designing and maintaining buildings with sustainable methods.
Fay’s interest in puzzles and games goes back to his childhood and has extended well into his professional life. Before coming to Hampshire, he worked for more than a decade in the game industry in different capacities, creating many digitally based games with educational themes, as well as a number of board games.
In addition to teaching game design at Hampshire, he has also taught a class on designing treasure hunts. His collected work can be seen at irafay.com.
As for his embedded puzzles in the Kern Center, Fay said, “I hope people get many hours of enjoyment at trying to solve these.”
The R.W. Kern Center is open seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.