Smith College Campus Center
Students at Smith College?the largest liberal arts institution for women in the country?are assigned to houses, many of them Victorian-era structures complete with living rooms. Meant to foster a collegial environment, while successful, they also create isolated communities. Broadening the opportunity for social interaction, the Smith College Campus Center serves as a mediating body, the only building at Smith available to all students, faculty, and staff.Serving as a junction between residential spaces and academic buildings, the sixty-thousand-square-foot campus center is imagined as an elaboration of an en-route passage through campus. Defined by the interconnecting contours of frequently traveled pathways into and out of the college and constructed on two sides by existing structures, the building is oriented as a pathway: one end opening toward the community of Northampton and the other onto the campus. The design clarifies Chapin Lawn, an expansive oval feature of Frederick Law Olmsted?s original site plan that had never been fully realized. By redefining this important element, the center establishes a prominent new setting for the 136-year-old school?s historic structures.The longitudinal expanse of the building?s exterior is clad in a white-stained wood panel system reminiscent of board-and-batten construction and akin to the white clapboard construction of many Northampton buildings. Articulated by a seemingly random sequence of battens...