The structure provides a flexible framework for an intensive and creative world, one that can transform to provide for a wide variety of approaches, personalities and teaching methodologies over time.
Susan T. Rodriguez, Design Partner
The building is integrated into the topography of its hilltop site adjacent the two-story, fieldstone President’s house: on the south a stepped grass-covered rooftop reduces the overall impact of the building on the natural environment and creates a new outdoor public focal point for the campus.
To encourage movement through the building and provide all students visual access to the creative process, the design incorporates pre-existing pedestrian paths between classroom facilities on the historic campus and dormitories to its west.
Glass affords visual transparency and maximizes daylighting within. Glass garage doors open to the landscaped terrace from the studios, critique spaces and café, achieving a physical permeability that blurs the distinction between landscape and architecture.
Art education makes sense only if art is conceived to be as central to life and to education as any other activity, and is not merely tolerated as a ‘cultural ornament’.
Kurt Roesch, Painter, Faculty Member 1934-1972
Studio spaces for painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, photography, film/new media, visual fundamentals, art history and visual culture are specific to each discipline; production spaces are accessible to all students, and general critique spaces, seminar rooms, technology clusters, teaching and exhibit spaces are interspersed throughout the building.
The building’s primary materials – locally-quarried fieldstone, cedar, channel glass and zinc – were inspired by the campus’s rich landscape and its historic architecture.
