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More Buildings Transforming
Campus for the 21st Century Construction for Smith's
new $5.6 million 352-space parking garage is in full swing. The
garage is being built on West Street adjacent to Garrison Hall,
home of the Office of College Relations. The completion date
is mid-December 2000. Visit www.smith.edu/physplant
for more information. The Picker Engineering Program
will have 9,600 square feet to call its own by the time classes
begin in the fall. The $1.7 million temporary structure will
connect with the Young Science Library behind Bass Hall. The
two-story building will provide Smith's first crop of engineering
students with classroom and lab space. Offices for engineering
faculty will be in a nearby building. Smith plans to dismantle
the temporary quarters in three to five years, after a larger,
permanent building is erected for the new engineering program. Plans for a proposed $15 million campus center next to John M. Greene Hall went back to the architectural drawing board to be reviewed and revised this winter after responses to preliminary renderings of the new building indicated serious concern about the design. Project architects will present a redeveloped design to the Smith community this spring. Ground breaking, originally scheduled for this summer, has been delayed.-JME |
Where in the World Do We Put 24,000 Works of Art? It's official. The $35 million project that will transform Smith's Fine Arts Center into an architectural wonder -- and the most ambitious capital construction project Smith has ever undertaken -- has begun. In anticipation of the selective demolition that begins this summer, the Museum of Art closed its doors in December. The doors will reopen in 2002. The closing spawned a huge project for museum staff: packing up some 24,000 objects, all the holdings within the renowned and prestigious art collection, and sending them off to locations across the U.S. Some pieces have gone on loan to such museums as the Stanford University art museum and the National Museum of Women's History; other pieces are now in storage in a top-secret location; and still others are touring as exhibits in major museums in cities around the country.
Despite its two-year closing,
the Smith Museum of Art has been anything but quiet inside. As
soon as the doors shut in December 1999 the de-installation and
packing of some 24,000 objects of art began. "American Spectrum, Paintings and Sculpture from the Smith College Museum of Art" is at the National Academy of Design Museum in New York City from June 17 through Sept. 10. It then goes to museums in West Palm Beach; Houston; Philadelphia; Rochester, N.Y.; and Tucson, a tour lasting until April 2002. "Corot to Picasso, European Masterworks from the Smith College Museum of Art" is showing at the Faulconer Gallery at Grinnell College in Iowa from June 30 through Sept. 10 and then goes on to museums in Jacksonville and Sarasota, Fla.; Stanford, Calif.; San Antonio; and Washington, D.C. It's been no easy task to arrange these exhibits, notes Suzannah Fabing, director and chief curator of the museum. "For a museum of our size to undertake three major shows in two years, covering 17 cities and accompanied by three catalogues, while packing up our collections and moving our offices -- well, it is not unique, but it is ambitious." In addition, the art library and art department will move to temporary headquarters this summer. The Hillyer Art Library will be closed from May 27 through June 20 while collections and services are relocated. The library will reopen in Alexander Graham Bell Hall at the Clarke School for the Deaf. Art classes, when the semester starts in September 2000, will be taught in leased buildings at the Clarke School. The buildings are all located on Round Hill Road just across Elm Street from the Quadrangle. Overall, this two-year project involves sweeping changes to all parts of the Fine Arts Center, a complex that includes the college's Department of Art, the Hillyer Art Library and the Museum of Art. When completed it will have increased the size of the museum and created more gallery and storage space. Proposals also include installing a passenger elevator, and adding a café, a large front lobby and space for a gift shop. The art department, which remains in full operation during the two-year renovations, will gain classroom and studio space, and a floor will be added over the library. New space will accommodate a state-of-the-art visual communications center and bring together the current art slide and photographic collections into a master catalogue, to become the basis for a high-resolution digitized image computer database. Architects James Stewart Polshek and Susan Rodriguez of Polshek Partnership Architects spoke on campus in March and described the details of the work ahead. Polshek, principal founder of the New York firm, described the appeal of the fine arts center renovation project. The original complex, he said, "was built as a war machine. It is not a friendly building. Our ideal is to take these components and turn its hostile forms into something completely new.So much of our work is a resolution between the old and the new." The firm has received kudos for recent renovation projects for such clients as Seamen's Church Institute of New York and New Jersey and the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the Museum of Natural History in New York. When the Rose Center opened in February, New Yorker magazine called it "possibly the most important building of the decade." The New York Times said of the Rose Center, which includes the new Hayden Planetarium: "Whatever your feelings about the old planetarium, you cannot accuse the new one of lacking long-term historical memory. The design is saturated with it. This is a mature modern building, a structure unafraid of revealing the deep roots from which modern architecture arose. The design's historical awareness far exceeds that of buildings that merely ape period styles." Rodriguez, a Polshek design principal for Smith's renovation project, said that the scope of the Smith project is about transforming and redefining the arts at Smith into "a complex of buildings that is more optimistic and creates a greater synergy between all users." She described the current condition of the complex, built in 1972, as "decrepit." Because of its location on Elm Street in Northampton, the Museum of Art is an important link to the community, she said, and one that needs to be beautified and enhanced. The architects have proposed removing the front exterior of the building, bumping it out 10 or 15 feet and creating a more visible bridge between Northampton and the campus. A new entrance and accessible ramp would make a clearly defined pathway to the complex from Elm Street. The design also calls for transforming the open-air courtyard connecting the museum and Hillyer into an enclosed atrium with a redefined walkway to campus. "The atrium," Rodriguez said, "will be the center of the whole complex, where everything comes together." This attractive new space will have year-round use and serve as a gathering place for visitors as well as students and faculty. It is also proposed that it may serve as a café and a performance space. For more information about the museum exhibits or the renovation project please visit www.smith.edu/artmuseum. |
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