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Smith College The new Brown Fine Arts Center
celebrates and visually redefines the arts at Smith College and creates
an elegant new campus gateway. The design transforms John Andrews's original
ensemble of 1970s buildings for the Museum of Art, Art Department and
Art Library by expanding and reconfiguring the Center to create a new
state-of-the-art facility. A central atrium unifies the Center and creates
a place for interchange between students, faculty, museum staff and visitors.
The newly re-configured building includes galleries, studios, library
reading rooms, imaging center, stacks, a 120-seat auditorium, art storage
facilities, café, Museum store and display classrooms. Renovations
to the remaining academic spaces address natural lighting conditions in
the studios, reconfigure faculty offices and create a new secure student
gallery. The design takes cues in form and material from the architectural
context of both the campus and the immediately adjacent historic district
in the town of Northampton. The building's primary materials - brick,
zinc, glass and metal - reinforce connections to the texture and quality
of the surrounding historic context. The design depends on a dynamic visual
balance between the transparency and reflectivity of glass and the opacity
of brick. Articulated planar brick walls in combination with large expanses
of glass shaded by an aluminum sunscreen define the overall mass of the
building. Selected to match College Hall, the brick, which envelopes the
entire building, is laid in a rich variety of textural patterns. Linear
recesses and projections animate the wall surface. The additional layer
of the metal sunscreen serves to soften the impact of the glass surface
when viewed from the exterior as well as to filter natural light inside
the studios and library. |
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