VSBA

The Dumbarton Oaks estate dates to the 18th century.  In 1920, Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss acquired the property and, over the next 45 years renovated and expanded it to house their noted Pre-Columbian and Byzantine collections and library.  Working with landscape architect Beatrix Ferrand, they transformed the grounds into a series of noteworthy gardens. In 1940, they created the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection to be managed by Harvard University.  VSBA was retained to implement a campus master plan for expansion, which centered on creation of a new library and renovation of the Main House.

Originally constructed in 1800, the Federal-era Main House was expanded and stylistically “updated” several times.  It now includes an historic Music Room and other additions by McKim, Mead and White, and Philip Johnson’s 1963 Pre-Columbian Gallery.

VSBA’s revitalization focused on redefining the public realm and its relationship to the galleries, adding visitor amenities, restoring historic interiors, and replacing building systems.  New amenities include a museum shop, an orientation gallery and new restrooms.  With library collections moved to the new research library, we relocated administrative offices from the basement to upper floors and collection storage and research facilities were upgraded and expanded.

We seamlessly integrated all new state-of-the-art environmental, fire protection, lighting, and security systems throughout the Main House.  Alterations were significant in some areas.  However, with careful detailing, matching of original materials and finishes, and reuse of paneling and doors, the overall effect is one of renewal rather than change, and the visitor’s experience has been greatly enhanced.  Strategic interventions — including the relocation of stairs, the addition of elevators, ramps, and new openings — reorganized circulation and enabled accessible routes throughout.

For the Philip Johnson Pre-Columbian wing, we replaced all curved glazing with insulated glazing, restored interior finishes, restored the fountain, added new lighting and roofing, and created a ramped entrance to aid accessibility.

Other Work at Dumbarton Oaks

Renovation of the Main House was one of a series of design and renovation projects VSBA completed for Dumbarton Oaks.  We designed a major new library building to provide additional academic research space and a substantial increase in collection storage capacity while maintaining the collection in a state-of-the-art environment.  On the service court across from the library, the original chauffeur’s house was renovated as a refectory, housing dining and kitchen facilities to support 40-50 lunchtime meals a day for fellows and staff.  Across the court, we renovated the current greenhouse and built a Gardeners’ Court service building to house a new central plant for the property and provide space for gardeners and the central receiving facility.

In 1920, Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss acquired the Dumbarton Oaks property for their noted Pre-Columbian and Byzantine collections and library.  Working with landscape architect Beatrix Ferrand, they transformed the grounds into a series of noted gardens. In 1940, they created the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection to be managed by Harvard University.  VSBA was retained in 2001 to implement a campus master plan for expansion, which centered on creation of a new library, renovation of the Main House, and design of a new refectory and central plant.

The new library provides academic research space and a substantial increase in state-of-the-art collection storage environments.  Its form derives from the neo-Georgian and wooded contexts.  Renovation of an original greenhouse provides primary reading space on the entry level.  Our extensive site work knits project components into the existing landscape while protecting and restoring original features of the gardens.

We restored the Main House’s historic interiors and renovated galleries and public spaces to improve circulation and provide visitor amenities.  Other renovated spaces are used for offices, collection storage, and research.  Our work included new mechanical and electrical systems and updated safety systems.

VSBA created this new organ studio for the Curtis Institute of Music.

We renovated and adapted spaces in Curtis’s historic main building to create the practice facility. The new chamber accommodates a custom-designed pipe organ while offering open studio space for the organ console and its users. The instrument itself was designed and installed by pipe organ builders Randall Dyer & Associates of Jefferson City, Tennessee.

We designed the organ studio to be acoustically separated from an historic meeting room on the floor above. Exterior street noise also had to be significantly reduced. In addition, a dedicated, acoustically-sensitive HVAC system was designed to meet requirements for minimal background noise.

The Rock Resource Center library is an important study center and repository for the Curtis Institute’s printed and audio materials, archives, and digital collections.

VSBA led the reprogramming and complete renovation of the building in two phases to improve reader services, study areas, collection storage, and staff offices. Building systems were replaced and a new elevator installed.

The Curtis Institute recently acquired 1620 Locust Street, which neighbors VSBA’s earlier Lenfest Hall.  We helped transform it into the Rubenstein Centre, a new administrative facility, by converting over 20 offices and supporting spaces.

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.

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.

Bryn Mawr’s campus core was shaped by Calvert Vaux, Frederick Law Olmsted, Ralph Adams Cram, Cope and Stewardson, Louis Kahn, and others. The orthogonal pattern of the early Collegiate Gothic campus is set in beautiful contrast to the undulating topography of the Romantic valley landscape to its west. Outside its planned core, the College has grown incrementally by annexing former private residences across peripheral streets. With this expansion of boundaries and changing of institutional needs over time, the patterns of use, circulation, and entrance on campus have shifted out of line with each other.

VSBA’s update to the firm’s original concept plan for Bryn Mawr College (which VSBA completed in the late 1990s) considered ways of adding to a campus with a distinct and beloved architectural and landscape character. It provided a framework for making decisions on accommodating expansion and setting priorities among projects, while addressing a number of specific needs identified by the College, including:

• improved facilities for the sciences.
• updated facilities for athletics and well-being
• ways of improving student and residential life, including new residence halls, as well as spaces for community activities and hanging out
• the potential impact of moving the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research to the campus core.

These concerns were related to broader development questions of access, linkage, growth, and conservation, as well as to needs the College has campus-wide for:

• a more sustainable approach to development
• greater accessibility and more coherent pedestrian circulation patterns
• modest, incremental short-term improvements based on the framework and understanding of the College’s long-term principles, priorities and options

Working with the College, we set up series of thematically-arranged individual and group interviews and work sessions, cutting across various segments of the College — faculty, staff, and students. We evolved general principles for campus development then suggested options for subareas of the campus where specific concerns needed to be addressed. These options were then combined into alternatives for the campus as a whole. Recommendations for meeting present needs were related to long-range options; possible first increments of development were suggested along with ways to make these compatible in spirit and scale with the delicate, loosely-woven landscape of the campus “outside the walls.”

VSBA worked with Brown University to strengthen the quality of student life on campus in order to help make students’ academic and educational experience better and their time at Brown more memorable.

The University encourages involvement in a medley of activities outside classes because “the educational experience extends to all aspects of students’ lives and…. the academic mission and program of the University have an important complement in the broad educational framework that students find outside the classroom.” Therefore “the range of activities on-and off-campus, the resources and the spaces, are all understood as a rich and complex educational whole.”

Evolving models of learning and teaching underscore the value of social spaces in helping to broaden university education. Cybercafés in libraries, study halls in student centers, coffee lounges in labs — these encourage interdisciplinary interactions and extend the scope of education beyond the classroom.

VSBA’s broad study encompassed a range of social and community facilities for dining, fitness, study, meeting, gathering, and performing. Our task was to help Brown identify community needs; recommend what, if any, type of campus center or organization and scales of programs would be good for the University; and determine what type of campus center or precinct makes sense for Brown. We also analyzed ways the University can enhance its campus facilities to tie them into educational, administrative, and financial plans and policies.

During the study it became clear that several basic questions would need to be answered before the University could make decisions on the type of student and campus life facilities it should promote:

• What aspects of campus life need further support and enhancement at Brown? Would a campus center be a vehicle for this enhancement?
• Should new campus life facilities — such as fitness and dining — be located in association with “sub-nuclei” such as residence halls or be organized as part of a centralized facility on campus?
• What site options should be considered? How do different sites address campus life needs? What campus center activities and configurations does each site support?
• What would be the right size and location for a new campus center?

Our planning and analyses revealed a current lack of a large, centralized facility offering co-curricular activities and services, such as spaces for student activities, dining, and studying.  We also completed a feasibility, programming, and conceptual design study for a campus center incorporating the existing four-building Metcalf complex. This historic complex could become a unique, and uniquely Brown, campus center.

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.

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.

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.

VSBA was retained to provide program validation and schematic design for a new 5-story, 400-500 bed freshman residence hall at the University of Alabama A major goal was to promote social integration among first year students living on campus.

We began by reviewing UA’s preliminary building arrangement concepts. We validated residential unit plans by testing issues such as HVAC system functionality, furniture quantity and size, and student movement and flexibility. We designed several options for typical residential units and worked with an estimator to develop benchmark cost estimates. Then we completed schematic design for the project.

As we designed, we thought of bedrooms like houses along corridor streets, each wing like a neighborhood. To encourage students to socialize outside their rooms, we fashioned communal spaces such as open lounges, flexible study areas, shared washrooms, and a game / media room. The building will also feature three major public spaces: a multipurpose room, a convenience retail store, and a storm shelter with recreation amenities, each of which can be accessed securely and independently of the residential units. A kitchen and community lounge on the first floor serves as town square.

The building’s site is near UA’s residential and student life precinct, in close proximity to dining and student center facilities. We helped create and strengthen pedestrian connections to student life amenities, especially through the incorporation of a new covered plaza and outdoor meeting area. As the university plans a nearby outdoor amphitheater, the residence hall was designed with community functions located directly adjacent and accessible at the ground level.

VSBA’s design also responds sensitively to UA’s Classic Revival architectural character, utilizing campus standard brick and other traditional campus materials.

Wellesley College’s leadership undertook a series of planning initiatives to assess different academic and student life systems.  Working groups were charged with envisioning the future of programs in the arts and media, the humanities, science and the environment, the student residential experience, and wellness and sports.

Wellesley asked VSBA to synthesize the results from these studies, considering each analysis individually and in relation to the College as a whole.  Our consolidated programming process helped to:

• identify and address areas of overlap, and gaps, between each of the program plans
• articulate goals for sustainability, accessibility, and preservation
• align the College’s goals with projected budgets.

The study helped guide decision-making by clarifying intentions and identifying choices and trade-offs throughout the process.  In the end, VSBA’s consolidated program planning helped to create an integrated, flexible framework to guide campus development for the next twelve to fifteen years.

VSBA designed this multipurpose venue for the private Roman Catholic Stuart Country Day School.  The program combines four disparate uses: chapel, auditorium, performance space, and communal center.  For such a multi-use facility, our design required thoughtful compromise and balance — mediating requirements for staging options, seating configurations, acoustics, site lines, and daylight control for various program uses.

To enable music, theater, and spoken word uses, reverberation time is adjustable through the use of fabric drops.  Site lines are balanced, both horizontally and vertically, to accommodate different uses.  Ample natural light via clerestory windows can be controlled using shades.  The representative tree branch pattern across the clerestory windows and stage curtain connects to the campus’s forest setting.