Smith College Campus Center
Imagined as an en-route passage through the campus, the building is defined by interconnecting paths that challenge the boundary between inside and outside.
At the intersection of the town of Northampton and the Smith College campus, the new 60,000-square-foot Campus Center provides students, faculty, and staff with a new setting for interaction, creating the college's only campus-wide communal space.
Imagined as an en-route passage through the campus, the building is defined by interconnecting paths that challenge the boundary between inside and outside. These paths converge into a long, curved, skylit gallery that forms the core of the Campus Center. This central corridor is lined with exhibition areas, performance spaces, dining facilities, lounges, mailrooms, and a bookstore. A series of outdoor terraces connect the building's communal areas with the surrounding campus grounds.
Concept sketch of the long, curved, skylit gallery that forms the core of the Campus Center.
Custom resin tables are cast with magnified and manipulated images from Smith College's botanical collection. Sunlight from the skylight above projects tinted shadows on the concrete floor.
The central route of the building is illuminated by the continuously curving skylight that adjusts in width from twelve feet to thirty-six feet.
The configuration of the campus center mediates between the finely scaled town streets (Elm Street) and the campus where it expands to frame a newly defined oval.
The building's exterior is clad in a white-stained wood panel system reminiscent of the board-and-batten construction and akin to the white clapboard construction of many Northampton buildings.
The exterior rainscreen facade is comprised of a system of pre-engineered wood panels.