Campus Spaces

Every month we’ll wrap up the latest and most engaging news on campus buildings and grounds.

Inside this month’s newsletter:

• Libraries and Museums Add Teaching Spaces
• A Spaceship Lands at Cal Poly Pomona
• A New Gold Standard for College Baseball
• Colby Expands Its Effort to Revitalize Its Hometown

As Libraries and Museums Focus on Teaching, Classrooms Become Priorities

Burlington, Vt. — Generations of undergraduates can probably be forgiven for supposing that their colleges’ collections of rare books and one-of-a-kind documents, locked away in ornate rooms in the library, were off limits to students. Or that their institutions’ museums, with silent guards and arcane exhibits, were primarily places to send visiting relatives on parents’ weekend.

But now colleges’ curators and special-collections librarians are co-teaching courses with faculty members, welcoming students to examine centuries-old volumes and delicate prints brought out of storage just for them, and even encouraging undergraduates to work with precious archival documents. Many collections are now being called “teaching collections” — but exactly where that teaching takes place can be a challenge when the materials are fragile or valuable, or both.

On more and more campuses, museum and library renovations have brought, or are bringing, dedicated classrooms. Dartmouth College’s just-completed overhaul of the Hood Museum of Art, by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, created the Bernstein Center for Object Study, a trio of classrooms to which faculty members can have works brought from storage so students can study them. A new art museum by Machado Silvetti Associates that is now under construction at Pomona College was designed with an emphasis on ease of access to the collection, and is intended to make teaching possible within both exhibit and storage areas.

And last fall, the University of Vermont moved its special-collections library out of a cramped basement space in the 1960s main library and into a just-renovated campus landmark designed by the American architect H.H. Richardson. Used in recent decades as a campus center, the building was constructed in 1885 as the university library, so its return to its original role is just one of the happy consequences of the $11.4-million project.

Known as Billings Library — the original donor, Frederick Billings, was a Vermont politician, financier, and railroad president — the building now houses a skylighted reading room and offices for special collections, a vault-like basement space for storage, and two classrooms. The more spectacular of the two, the Marsh Room, has its own rich history: It was added to the library soon after it was completed to house a 12,000-volume collection that Billings himself had bought from George Perkins Marsh, a Vermont diplomat and early conservation advocate. Many of Marsh’s books are still on the special-collections shelves. The room, with wood-paneled walls and a huge fireplace, can be configured for events for up to 49 people.

In addition, there are offices for the university’s Holocaust-studies center, the humanities center, and the Center for Research on Vermont; an exhibit space in a round room on one end of the building; and on the other end, a study space that lives up to students’ requests. “They want, you know, something like Hogwarts,” one library administrator says, and the 1885 reading room fits the bill perfectly.

Still, “the greatest advantage to moving is that our teaching space is now separate from our research space,” says Jeffrey Marshall, director of special collections, so researchers using the collection aren’t interrupted every time a class meets. Along with Angeline C. Chiu, an associate professor of classics, Marshall taught a course last fall called “From Cuneiform to Kindles: Seven Millenia of Written Communication,” whose students met regularly in the Marsh Room to look at various volumes brought up from storage to illustrate concepts covered in the class.

Chiu, an Ovid specialist, was attracted to the university in part because the rare-books collection includes nearly 300 editions of Ovid’s works dating back to 1480. But she learned how valuable the collection can be for teaching early in her career here, when she took an Honors College class to the library to see Shakespeare volumes. “They just set out a wonderful display of all these items,” she says. “By the end of the class, the students were taking selfies with the Second Folio.”

Not every overhaul aimed at making it easier to use collections for teaching is a complete makeover. The University of Pennsylvania added a Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials to its Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology five years ago, before it started a big renovation that is now underway. More than 1,300 undergraduates and graduate students have taken courses in the center since.

And the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College carved a classroom space out of its basement art-storage area two years ago, says David E. Little, the museum director. There had always been an upstairs classroom in the 1949 building, he notes, but moving works to a classroom within the storage area is quicker and less likely to cause damage. And for students, he says, “it’s so important for them to walk through that doorway” and be right where the college’s artworks are stored.

Little notes that other changes the museum has made to benefit teaching don’t involve renovations at all. For instance, the Mead is open till midnight four days a week during the semester, so students can use it as study space or perhaps seek inspiration for an assignment. And at the end of each semester, he says, “we get inundated with requests” to view works that have been discussed in one class or another.

Beyond that, the Mead works with students in some classes to write the labels that appear beside artworks on display. And a donor created an acquisition fund with the intent that students, after initial guidance from the museum staff, make the final decision on what to buy and why. “Whoever wants to show up can vote,” says Little.

New Buildings and Recent Renovations

Cal Poly Pomona has opened a $79-million Student Services Building (pictured above) to replace Antoine Predock’s 1992 Classroom/Laboratory/Administration complex, a landmark to drivers on the I-10 freeway but one beset by seismic issues and leaks. The new building, by CO Architects, looks somewhat like a spaceship that has just landed — and, at 138,000 square feet, it’s very large spaceship. It is bisected by a pedestrian route across the campus, with offices on one side and multipurpose rooms on the other. The offices, in turn, are wrapped around a courtyard that brings plenty of daylight to the interior. Read more.

“The New Dude”: Mississippi State U. tore down its old baseball stadium, Dudy Noble Field, and built a $68-million replacement designed by Populous. A site called d1baseball.com says the New Dude is “the new gold standard for college baseball.” Read more.

Macalester College has completed the renovation and expansion of its 1965 Fine Arts Center by opening a new Theater and Dance Building. It has a flexible performance space, a dance studio, classrooms, and more. HGA did the design work. Read more.

Indiana U. has formally opened the home of its new architecture master’s program, which has taken over a landmark 1971 building by Myron Goldsmith that was built for the ColumbusRepublicnewspaper (pictured below). Read more.

On Campus and Beyond

Colby College, which last fall opened a residence hall in downtown Waterville, has now chosen architects and a management company for a hotel it hopes to open downtown in 2020. The facility will be continue the college’s effort to revitalize its hometown. Read more.

James Madison U. will name a new dorm for Paul Jennings, who spent more than half his life as a slave owned by James and Dolley Madison. Jennings moved to Washington with Madison during his presidency, and later purchased his own freedom for $8 a month. Read more.

Western Carolina U. plans to replace two large residence halls that together house about 1,150 students. Three new buildings, designed by Hanbury Evans Wright Vlattas and Company, would house about 250 students each, and room is available for a fourth. Read more.

Students looking for off-campus housing near Cornell U. will now be able to learn about the safety of various off-campus buildings on a university website. The site will offer information on fire safety and emergency egress, among other concerns. Read more.

Gallaudet U., where the principles of designing spaces for deaf people were first articulated, is working with a developer to build new 1.2 million square feet of residential, office, and retail space near the campus. The most important element? The right lighting. Read more.

UC-Davis and a New Jersey developer are building a 3,300-bed, $575-million project that they say is currently the largest student-housing construction effort in the U.S. Recreation fields and a community center will join nine four-story buildings. Read more.

A small college in Boston, the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology, wants to sell its three-building campus and use the money to build better facilities for its 600 students. The institute was founded in 1908 with money from Franklin’s 1789 will. Read more.

Brown U. has unveiled plans for a new Performing Arts Center whose main performance hall will have five different possible configurations for concerts, plays, and other presentations. The design is by REX. Read more.

And Julia Morgan, the pioneering California architect whose works include buildings at Mills College and the UC-Berkeley, has finally gotten a New York Times obit — 62 years after her death. Read more.