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Campus
Center Featured in Weiss/Manfredi Monograph
The Smith College Campus Center is handsomely depicted in
photographs in a new compilation of recent large-scale projects
designed by the architectural firm Weiss/Manfredi.
An early sketch of the Campus Center concept, from Surface/Subsurface. |
The Campus Center, a 56,000-square-foot
building, opened on August 25, 2003, to provide a central
space for the Smith community to hold meetings, socialize,
dine and study. The facility also houses the Grécourt Bookshop, the mail
center and a café.
“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,” notes the Weiss/Manfredi book, titled Surface/Subsurface, and
recently published by Princeton Architectural Press. “The
Smith College Campus Center serves as a mediating body, the
only building at Smith available to all students, faculty
and staff.”
Surface/Subsurface, which
is distributed by , pictorially outlines nine
major projects designed by the firm since 2000 and the release
of Site Specific, a
similar monograph showcasing its previous projects. The book
includes a foreword by Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of the Harvard
University Design School; an introduction by David Leatherbarrow,
professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania
School of Design; and a question-and-answer interview with
Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, the principles of the
firm.
The shape of the future
Smith Campus Center, as envisioned by Weiss/Manfredi. |
The designs depicted in Surface/Subsurface emphasize
Weiss/Manfredi’s approach
to architecture that factors in the structures’ surroundings.
“Engagement with the site in its broadest sense is
one of the distinguishing features of the work of Weiss/Manfredi,” comments
Mostafavi. “In their projects, the area under consideration
is often much larger than the actual building site and more
akin to the territory of forces that affect construction,
which includes the infrastructure.”
That firm’s approach is evidenced in the Smith Campus
Center’s accommodating shape and function in relation
to its surroundings. “The building is oriented as a
pathway: one end opening toward the community of Northampton,
Massachusetts, and the other onto the campus,” the
book describes. “With its welcoming furniture and pathway
orientation, the campus center closes the physical and social
gap between residential and institutional buildings, creating
a communal living room for the college.”
Other projects featured in Surface/Subsurface include
the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, Washington; Flushing
Meadows Corona Park, part of New York City’s NYC2012,
a bid to host the Olympics; the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca,
New York; the Brooklyn Botanic Garden; and the Robin Hood
Library at Public School 42 in Arverne, New York. |
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