Celebrated Architect to Discuss His Upcoming Project at Smith

James Stewart Polshek, principal and founder of Polshek Partnership Architects, the firm that will be renovating the Smith College Fine Arts Complex, will present a public lecture on the project at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 7, in Wright Hall Auditorium.

The lecture, titled "Transformative Architecture: Renovation and Expansion of the Smith College Fine Arts Complex," is free and wheelchair-accessible and will be followed by a reception in the Museum of Art with an informal viewing of the Fine Arts Center spaces to be renovated.

Known for its powerful architectural designs for cultural, educational and governmental buildings, Polshek Partnership has designed a number of museums and galleries, including the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University and the Museum of the City of New York. The Polshek-designed Rose Center for Earth and Space at the Museum of Natural History in New York, which opened this month, has been lauded by the New Yorker magazine as possibly "the most important building of the decade and by The New York Times as "an intelligent design that will also appeal to broad public taste."
Polshek also designed the renovation to Smith's Sage Hall, a project completed in 1991.

February 29, 2000