NEWS

Dartmouth College, Baker / Berry Library

April 19th, 2017

Baker Library, the College’s beloved humanities and social sciences library, has been the center of academic life at Dartmouth College.  The Berry addition doubles the size of the existing facility and accommodates new public functions, technical services, reading areas, a café, and the computing services and History departments.  The original Baker Library building, essentially unchanged since its construction in 1929, was renovated to accommodate new mechanical systems and comply with current fire and life safety codes.  Certain traditional reading rooms and gracious public spaces were carefully restored.

The expanded library occupies a pivotal site between the proposed academic row on one side and the College’s New England commons — the College Green — on the other, thus becoming a focal point at the heart and crossroads of both old and new campuses.  The Berry addition extends the library north, anticipating and helping to generate orderly campus development in that direction.  Its linear form and imageful north facade terminate the axis of the new row and identify it much as the existing south facade of Baker Library defines the College Green to the south.

Dartmouth College, Rauner Special Collections Library

April 19th, 2017

VSBA’s challenge was to transform an underutilized building on an important site into an accessible, functional, and visually evocative library for rare books and manuscripts with a secure and carefully controlled environment.  The scope of the renovation included a reading room, study and seminar rooms, offices, and technical support spaces.

Our design preserves the monumental interior hall as the reading room.  As the original exterior walls of the building could not effectively provide thermal and moisture protection for the controlled collections space without substantial modifications, an aluminum and glass curtainwall enclosure was designed to create a transparent “building within a building.”  This glazed “lantern” of book stacks maintains temperature and humidity levels for the sensitive collection, protecting them in a vapor-tight environment while making them more visually accessible.

The reading room accommodates 36 users and is surrounded by shelves of reference materials.  Office and seminar rooms beneath the balconies are acoustically isolated to allow groups the use of collections with contemporary audio and visual media.  Above, the mezzanine provides students with a comfortable and quiet study area, with views from the large windows to the surrounding campus, lending an outward focus to a building that had formerly been oriented towards an interior stage.  Additional book storage is accommodated in an adjacent underground area with vegetative roof to blend seamlessly into the surrounding landscape.  The new Special Collections Library is a dialogue between the original neoclassical and the new.  The machine-like curtainwall is juxtaposed with gentle detailing on the walls, ceiling, and balcony front, while the millwork and curtainwall relate to the original building’s variety of scales.

Swarthmore College, Tarble Student Center

April 19th, 2017

When Swarthmore’s Sharples Student Center, located in a beautiful old building that had once been the library, burned down, the College began to consider various alternatives for replacement:  rebuilding on the burned site; making alterations to another distinguished and treasured Collegiate Gothic Building, Clothier Hall; or building an entirely new structure.  VSBA was retained to study these alternatives in collaboration with a special committee composed administration, faculty, trustee, and student constituents.  As the study progressed, it became clear that alteration of Clothier Hall was the preferred choice, but there was much concern about preserving its very beautiful, arched interior spaces, and about the heavy use the campus center would generate.

VSBA developed an innovative design solution providing necessary program spaces while preserving, protecting, and displaying the interior’s irreplaceable beauty.  Our design inserted a free-standing structure — a “building within a building” — creating two levels of use.  The basement and first floor house the bookshop, lounges, and other services, while the upper level is used for dances, assemblies, theater productions, and campus activities.

Tarble celebrates the beauty of the old building, comfortably accommodates all the activities originally housed in the burned library as well as other identified needs, and restores and preserves the interior and exterior fabric of the original 1920s Collegiate Gothic Building.

Philadelphia Zoo, George D. Widener Memorial Tree House and New Children’s Zoo

April 19th, 2017

When VSBA was commissioned to design the new Children’s Zoo, part of the program called for a special exhibit area to create visitor understanding of and sympathy with the natural world of science.  Traditionally this has been achieved through a teach/learn environment, but in this case the desire was to go beyond the usual constraints and involve visitors on an emotional and physical level.  Thus the most important element in the new Children’s Zoo became the reuse of an architecturally distinguished Victorian building to house a series of innovative, interactive exhibits depicting different animal and plant environments.

We designed a non-traditional exhibit style, an environmental approach that actively immerses visitors in a real physical context.  The design allows many visitors to experience the new context simultaneously, a critical factor in accommodating large crowds on high-attendance days.

In the four-year design and construction process of the Tree House, we have been responsible for initial research and development of each individual environment.  We have also developed innovative uses for artificial materials such as fiberglass, building insulation, rubber and plastic to develop artificial trees, vegetation, animal forms and so forth that will maintain the exhibits’ illusions and that can take constant handling by the public and the physical abuse the exhibits will receive.

The exhibits are intimately associated with the architecture of the building, with structures and contexts placed to complement and be complemented by the building’s many spatial characteristics.  The visitors’ experience of the wonderful old architecture becomes integral to the exhilarating experience of the exhibits themselves.  Thus a Victorian building from a previous era is not only preserved, but put to effective use in an urban zoo of today.

Harvard University, Memorial Hall Restoration and Renovation

April 19th, 2017

We restored and renovated Harvard University’s Memorial Hall as a campus and dining center.  Designed by Ware and Van Brunt between 1865 and 1870 to commemorate Harvard’s Civil War dead, Memorial Hall is one of the finest examples of Ruskinian Gothic architecture in the nation.  The renovated Memorial Hall contains the soaring Annenberg Hall, restored to its original use as a dining facility, the Loker Commons campus center beneath it, and the paneled, polychromed Sanders Theatre, a 1,200-seat lecture and performance venue.

We restored interior finishes in historic public rooms and replicated lost chandeliers in Annenberg Hall.  On the basement level, we accommodated Loker Commons’ modern needs with a small addition providing loading, food preparation, and storage facilities in an exciting bazaar-like and flexible space.  Original masonry materials and patterns were replicated in the addition and site wall.

Lighting design was crucial in making the below-grade areas serve many functions at once.  We used diminishing ambient light alongside local spot and decorative lighting — in sometimes colorful ways — to promote character, identity, and amenity.  Along the main circulation route, ornamented by lively fluorescent lights, are old-fashioned spot-lit bulletin boards, while a big-scale LED display at the end of this axis provides dynamic and varied communication, including graphic information and iconography.

We also restored Sanders Theatre, home of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and one of the most prominent, intimate venues in the Boston area.  VSBA restored the theatre to its original appearance while augmenting it with new sound, lighting, audio-visual, and mechanical systems.  The stage was intended to better accommodate performers and acoustical glazing was added to the windows.  Support spaces, including a green room and dressing rooms, were added below.

Princeton University, Frist Campus Center

April 19th, 2017

VSBA renovated and expanded Palmer Hall, Princeton University’s original physics laboratory, to house the new Frist Campus Center. The University first proposed a campus center in the 1920s, but the project wasn’t undertaken until the 1990s. Palmer Hall, historically significant though deteriorated and underutilized at the periphery of the traditional campus core, over time became the geographical center of the changing campus. Paths linking academic, social, recreational, and residential activities intersected at the site.

The design for the campus center is organized to reinforce these paths and establish the facility as a locus of activity along these routes — at once a destination and point of passage and casual interaction. The primary procession through the facility follows the terraced grading of the site. Visitors approaching from the north flow through a new arcade, designed as an extension of the existing building, into entries at Palmer’s lower level and move south through a series of “streets” lined with shops, student mail and information boards. At the end of these paths is a light-filled lounge overlooking an atrium with views opening out to the south. A generous flight of stairs leads further down to a dining room which opens south onto a terrace and lawn. Multiple entries are provided at this level for those approaching from the south.

The adaptation of an existing building is appropriate for a campus center, providing discovered places and lived-in spaces for a mix of uses. As a form of generic loft building — with repetitive, generous spaces readily adapted for multiple uses — Palmer provides for many aspects of the campus center program. These spaces are juxtaposed with open and flowing spaces appropriate to the new construction and constituting the south face of the building as a whole.

Frist’s state-of-the art academic spaces include new classrooms outfitted with extensive audiovisual systems; one was restored with the original seating and a display of the room’s original scientific apparatuses, while another retained its original vaulted and ribbed plaster ceiling but was completely transformed to house a film and performance theater. Frist also offers a home to Princeton’s East Asian Library and Gest Collection.

The new arcade and multiple entries at the north face make more public the rather private and closed façade of Palmer, while respecting the beautiful quality of the Jacobean style of its architecture. But there is no ambiguity between new and existing in the complex. The south, window-walled façade cloaking the wing of new construction represents the singular nature of the Frist Campus Center — a communal entity and a place of community. At night the lighted interior is opened-up, displaying multiple architectural layers and a rich mix of activity.