Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects create "beautiful, thoughtful, well-made architecture" at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Read the review by Robert Campbell in the Boston Globe. boston | bugmenot
Center of attention on a centerless campus
Wellesley's maze-like showpiece reflects the college's diversity of students and landscape
By Robert Campbell, Globe Correspondent | November 13, 2005
WELLESLEY -- The new student center at Wellesley College does something you'd never expect. It tries to look as incoherent and unplanned as the campus itself. Like a street sign that can't make up its mind, it seems to be pointing in six directions at once.
''It turns, it leans, it pivots," says Peter Fergusson, a professor of art history who was part of Wellesley's client team. ''It's faceted, it's fractured. It's a model of looseness, dispersal, indirection, variety." He thinks those qualities mirror the social diversity of Wellesley itself. ''Wellesley students today are drawn from many different classes and nations," he says.
The center is formally the Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center. It reflects more than the diversity of the student body. It's also a metaphor for Wellesley's landscape.
''Wellesley is centerless," says Michael Van Valkenburgh, a landscape architect who created a master plan for Wellesley College in 1998.
''The campus is so inscrutable. Visitors never quite get it," says Mack Scogin, a former chairman of architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design who designed Wang with his wife and partner Merrill Elam.
Even as far back as 1902, noted landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. was confused by Wellesley. ''I must admit that the exceedingly intricate and complex topography and the peculiarly scattered arrangement of most of the buildings somewhat baffled me," wrote Olmsted. ''I came away with a less clear and comprehensive grasp of the whole situation than I could wish."
The point of all this is that ''clear and comprehensive" is exactly what Wellesley isn't, never was, and doesn't want to be. Scogin and Fergusson compare it to what they call ''male campuses," like Harvard or, even more so, Columbia and Virginia. In those places, there is a dominant central space and a powerful sense of hierarchy. Wellesley, where the buildings wander the hills in apparent disorder, is not about hierarchy.
''The place is built around nurturing individuality, about independent thinkers," says Van Valkenburgh. ''It does not look like a men's college. At Wellesley, the landscape beckons you but asks you to find your own way." So does Wang.
Some may do a double take at Wang's appearance. From some angles, the building looks like a frozen explosion. But this is beautiful, thoughtful, well-made architecture. It is indeed hard to find your way around inside. ''We wanted it simple, but not legible," says Scogin. But the maze-like interior is well suited to the building's purposes. Wang is not a building you can take in all at once. It is a building you must explore, the way you explore a landscape.
The savvy student will become an inside dopester. She will know where in Wang you go to hide out, where you go to socialize, where to sit and admire the best view, where to find a beer or a sandwich. In that way, she'll make it her own. Wang belongs to the exploring, colonizing student, not to a central bureaucracy.
Wellesley has only 2,700 students, yet they sustain an incredible 177 different student activities. Part of Wang's purpose is to house them all. Scogin and Elam couldn't make 177 rooms. Instead they've created a fascinating wall of lockers, one for each activity, interspersed with round moon-like lights. Students pull their stuff out of a locker and take it to any available meeting space.
Wang is thus like a traditional Japanese house, where furnishings are pulled out of wall storage to convert the same room, at different times, into a space for sleeping, living, or dining. A lot of Wang's rooms are like that. They exist for whatever purpose someone wants to put them to. They're not labeled or preprogrammed. ''Unowned space," Scogin calls it.
There's lots else in the building, all the usual stuff of a student center. A bookstore, a pub, a cafe, outdoor terraces, mailboxes, numberless crannies for study or talk, one big room for parties or meetings. There are no faculty offices and no classrooms. Wang is a place for having fun.
Despite its novelty, Wang plays with traditional themes of New England architecture. It looks to the past as well as the future. Most of the exterior walls are finished in a lovely weave of copper shingles, reminiscent of the cedar shakes on a seaside cottage. In other places, usually nearer the ground, the copper changes shape into long horizontal lines that remind you of clapboard siding or rusticated stonework. Scogin notes that Wellesley has a ''prickly skyline," a sky pierced with cupolas and steeples. He's made sure that Wang meets the sky with its own kind of bristles.
The site is the other marvel of Wang. Previously, this was an asphalt parking lot at one of the two main car entrances to the campus. Landscape architect Van Valkenburgh began by reopening a pond. Using the excavation material from the construction of Wang, he then shaped three miniature drumlins, small hump-like hills like those scattered around New England eons ago by a withdrawing glacier. He seeded the land with a great variety of plants, not all of them native -- reflecting, again, the diversity of Wellesley's population. He created a landscape as lovely as any other in Wellesley's famed campus.
I have two minor reservations. Near Wang stands a new parking garage, also designed by Scogin and Elam. Its backside is tucked into a hill, which helps, but the front is faced with a sort of screen of vertical poles standing at drunken angles to one another. No doubt this is a metaphor for a forest grove, but it comes across as cartoonish.
The second problem is, of course, that in a centerless campus there can't be a central location for a campus ''center." Wang is at least a 15-minute walk from the farthest dorms.
That said, Wang remains one of the best recent buildings in New England. Go treat yourself to a cappuccino and a lakeside walk.
Robert Campbell, the Globe's architecture critic, can be reached at camglobe@aol.com
4 Comments
Interested, but these links don't work
boston globe worked for me, but you gotta sign up for bugmenot...
Wellesley's maze-like showpiece reflects the college's diversity of students and landscape
By Robert Campbell, Globe Correspondent | November 13, 2005
WELLESLEY -- The new student center at Wellesley College does something you'd never expect. It tries to look as incoherent and unplanned as the campus itself. Like a street sign that can't make up its mind, it seems to be pointing in six directions at once.
''It turns, it leans, it pivots," says Peter Fergusson, a professor of art history who was part of Wellesley's client team. ''It's faceted, it's fractured. It's a model of looseness, dispersal, indirection, variety." He thinks those qualities mirror the social diversity of Wellesley itself. ''Wellesley students today are drawn from many different classes and nations," he says.
The center is formally the Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center. It reflects more than the diversity of the student body. It's also a metaphor for Wellesley's landscape.
''Wellesley is centerless," says Michael Van Valkenburgh, a landscape architect who created a master plan for Wellesley College in 1998.
''The campus is so inscrutable. Visitors never quite get it," says Mack Scogin, a former chairman of architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design who designed Wang with his wife and partner Merrill Elam.
Even as far back as 1902, noted landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. was confused by Wellesley. ''I must admit that the exceedingly intricate and complex topography and the peculiarly scattered arrangement of most of the buildings somewhat baffled me," wrote Olmsted. ''I came away with a less clear and comprehensive grasp of the whole situation than I could wish."
The point of all this is that ''clear and comprehensive" is exactly what Wellesley isn't, never was, and doesn't want to be. Scogin and Fergusson compare it to what they call ''male campuses," like Harvard or, even more so, Columbia and Virginia. In those places, there is a dominant central space and a powerful sense of hierarchy. Wellesley, where the buildings wander the hills in apparent disorder, is not about hierarchy.
''The place is built around nurturing individuality, about independent thinkers," says Van Valkenburgh. ''It does not look like a men's college. At Wellesley, the landscape beckons you but asks you to find your own way." So does Wang.
Some may do a double take at Wang's appearance. From some angles, the building looks like a frozen explosion. But this is beautiful, thoughtful, well-made architecture. It is indeed hard to find your way around inside. ''We wanted it simple, but not legible," says Scogin. But the maze-like interior is well suited to the building's purposes. Wang is not a building you can take in all at once. It is a building you must explore, the way you explore a landscape.
The savvy student will become an inside dopester. She will know where in Wang you go to hide out, where you go to socialize, where to sit and admire the best view, where to find a beer or a sandwich. In that way, she'll make it her own. Wang belongs to the exploring, colonizing student, not to a central bureaucracy.
Wellesley has only 2,700 students, yet they sustain an incredible 177 different student activities. Part of Wang's purpose is to house them all. Scogin and Elam couldn't make 177 rooms. Instead they've created a fascinating wall of lockers, one for each activity, interspersed with round moon-like lights. Students pull their stuff out of a locker and take it to any available meeting space.
Wang is thus like a traditional Japanese house, where furnishings are pulled out of wall storage to convert the same room, at different times, into a space for sleeping, living, or dining. A lot of Wang's rooms are like that. They exist for whatever purpose someone wants to put them to. They're not labeled or preprogrammed. ''Unowned space," Scogin calls it.
There's lots else in the building, all the usual stuff of a student center. A bookstore, a pub, a cafe, outdoor terraces, mailboxes, numberless crannies for study or talk, one big room for parties or meetings. There are no faculty offices and no classrooms. Wang is a place for having fun.
Despite its novelty, Wang plays with traditional themes of New England architecture. It looks to the past as well as the future. Most of the exterior walls are finished in a lovely weave of copper shingles, reminiscent of the cedar shakes on a seaside cottage. In other places, usually nearer the ground, the copper changes shape into long horizontal lines that remind you of clapboard siding or rusticated stonework. Scogin notes that Wellesley has a ''prickly skyline," a sky pierced with cupolas and steeples. He's made sure that Wang meets the sky with its own kind of bristles.
The site is the other marvel of Wang. Previously, this was an asphalt parking lot at one of the two main car entrances to the campus. Landscape architect Van Valkenburgh began by reopening a pond. Using the excavation material from the construction of Wang, he then shaped three miniature drumlins, small hump-like hills like those scattered around New England eons ago by a withdrawing glacier. He seeded the land with a great variety of plants, not all of them native -- reflecting, again, the diversity of Wellesley's population. He created a landscape as lovely as any other in Wellesley's famed campus.
I have two minor reservations. Near Wang stands a new parking garage, also designed by Scogin and Elam. Its backside is tucked into a hill, which helps, but the front is faced with a sort of screen of vertical poles standing at drunken angles to one another. No doubt this is a metaphor for a forest grove, but it comes across as cartoonish.
The second problem is, of course, that in a centerless campus there can't be a central location for a campus ''center." Wang is at least a 15-minute walk from the farthest dorms.
That said, Wang remains one of the best recent buildings in New England. Go treat yourself to a cappuccino and a lakeside walk.
Robert Campbell, the Globe's architecture critic, can be reached at camglobe@aol.com
Thanks not.
Got it, but no photos!? Just renderings on the Scogin Elam website.
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.