Haverford College

OPEN GALLERY

Highlights

• Site – 1 acre; Building – 25,000 sq ft
• All primary program spaces open onto and animate the heart of the building.
• The VCAM facility evolved in response to a cross-disciplinary mission grounded in visual culture.
• The historic running track provides circulation and casual learning space.
• The project reestablishes critical campus walkway links
• Gym flooring is repurposed into decorative ceilings.
• Wood from a campus tree became stair treads and tabletops.
• Material reuse promotes a spirit of making and memory.
• The project preserved all affected trees and removed an abandoned squash court to create public green space for making, performance, and display.
• Combined uses alleviated the need for a building addition, thereby preserving funds and creating an opportunity on the master planning level for future campus infill.

Perspectives

The VCAM project repurposes a 1910 gymnasium, which sat largely unused since the construction of a modern recreation building in 2005, into a curricular and co-curricular facility for visual culture, arts, and media. The programming goals for the space are threefold: to bring visual literacy, the arts, and creative design into the interstices of the liberal arts and programming across STEM, the humanities, and the natural and social sciences; to create spaces for the campus to engage with local and Philadelphia communities year round; and to explore technology and innovation with an eye to both social entrepreneurship and critical awareness in legal and scientific venues.

The following principles guided the design:

• Nexus – Create relationships with adjacent buildings and landscape spaces and a central vertical campus transition point.
• Collaboration – Foster interaction by creating openness, comfort, visibility, activity, and self-organization.
• Hub – Create a compelling center from which all activities radiate.
• Adaptability – Provide a flexible physical environment that gracefully accommodates change.
• Memory – Collage existing architecture with new architecture.
• Directness – Use materials, organization, and form in honest, elegant, and intuitive ways.
• Function – Be maintainable and efficient.
• Activation – Provide opportunities to attain visual literacy through dynamic spaces.

Project Team

MSR Design; also Nave Newell, Inc.; Keast & Hood Co.; Bruce E. Brooks & Associates; The Whiting-Turner Contracting Company