ARCHITECTURAL RECORD

Winter Visual Arts Center at Franklin & Marshall College by Steven Holl Architects

October 2, 2020 Clifford A. Pearson

The three-story, steel structure rests on a pair of concrete volumes housing art studios and galleries and separated by the forum. The upper floors cantilever from an average of 16 feet to a maximum of 27 feet beyond the lower concrete walls, offering column-free space for various studios, seminar rooms, and an 83-seat auditorium/cinema. Silman Associates engineered lightweight truss frames concealed within interior walls and extending up to tubular roof beams, a system that echoes Holl’s vision of a box kite. Translucent channel glass wraps much of the building, providing soft illumination for art students working inside during the day and creating an ethereal aura at night. The rest of the building envelope is either stucco or clear glass. Less expensive than curved glass, the channel glass traces the undulating facade in vertical facets without going over budget. Toreduce heating and cooling needs, the architects used a double layer of channel glass with translucent insulation in between. A reflecting pool out front adds a rippling effect to the building exterior, while also serving as a storm-water retention tank. Walking from Old Main, students and faculty can enter the visual arts center either on the ground level or take a long, gentle ramp to the second floor. The ramp helps negotiate the drop in elevation from the older part of campus to the new building’s site, layering a man-made route above the existing topography. It also gives equal status to the first and second floors, with each hosting a “main” entrance. Bending around a large tree near the entry, the ramp may evoke that of Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center at Harvard, but it’s different, says Holl, because it doesn’t flow through the building.

Light is an animating element in the building with the expanses of channel glass acting as modern shoji screens, says Holl, and numerous rectangular skylights adding another source in the studios and common spaces. Clear-glass windows placed close to the floor allude to the Japanese strategy of “borrowing” scenery. “We wanted to frame particular views to the landscape below, while allowing students to focus mostly on their work,” explains McVoy. All windows and skylights are operable, creating natural ventilation throughout the building. Manipulating light through a spectrum of clear-translucent-opaque materials is a hallmark of Holl’s work, from his Chapel of St. Ignatius at Seattle University (1997) to Higgins Hall at Pratt Institute (2005) and the Visual Arts Building at the University of Iowa.

Instead of corridors, a “commons” on the second floor provides access to studios, the cinema, and a darkroom while serving as a social hub. Sixteen-foot-high pivoting wood doors encourage easy circulation from studios to the commons. The architects specified tongue-and-groove-connected Douglas fir planks for ceilings to add warmth to the interiors but also to give Amish carpenters in the area the chance to work on the project. Studios on the second floor are tall spaces, rising 18 to 22 feet, allowing the design team to insert a mezzanine level with smaller studios and seminar rooms. The building opened this fall with limited numbers of people allowed in at a time, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Its generous social spaces and natural ventilation make it adaptable to the current health situation, says McVoy.

Since the project could be easily serviced from his New York City office, Holl didn’t associate with a local architect and his team took charge of everything from construction documents to details such as door handles and railings. “It wasn’t quite a Gesamtkunstwerk,” says Holl, “but we got the chance to do a lot.” Although much smaller than the Reach, Holl’s expansion to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. or his addition to the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City, the Winter Visual Arts Center shares a knack for integrating architecture and landscape and introducing a more organic geometry to an existing framework of orthogonal forms. Tent-like, it touches the ground lightly and welcomes both the campus and the town inside. In doing so, it points a long-established institution in a new direction.