Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google

Dartmouth College: The Black Family Visual Arts Center

  • 08/01/15
Black Family Visual Arts Center at Dartmouth College

PHOTOS © ANTON GRASSL/ESTO

The Visual Arts Center marks the eastern entrance to Dartmouth’s campus and formalizes a mixture of significant buildings into a re-envisioned Arts Precinct. The 105,000-square-foot building stretches along Lebanon Street, where the institution engages the town of Hanover, NH. The project provides a formal lawn and hardscaped Arts Plaza, which invites the public to participate in a renewed focus on the arts at Dartmouth.

Designed by Machado and Silvetti Associates of Boston, the building consolidates Dartmouth’s Studio Art and Film and Media departments into a single facility for the first time in the college’s history, and provides spaces for a newly created Digital Humanities program. The facility houses sculpture, printmaking, photography, architecture, painting and drawing studios, as well as state-of-the-art film production, animation and editing spaces. At the heart of the facility is the Arts Forum, a central atrium space that brings light and air into the core of the urban block. The three-story space is designed to promote cross-disciplinary interaction and the collegial sharing of ideas.

On the ground floor, the public is welcomed to the Visual Arts Center through a lobby and 250-seat auditorium. Adjacent to the theater is a shared exhibition gallery where student and faculty work from both of the building’s departments will be displayed. The gallery and theater lobby are designed with large picture windows facing the street and Arts Plaza, to share the creative work of the college with pedestrians and the town. The use of exterior slate blocks and precast concrete panels throughout the ground floor makes the space an extension of the public sidewalk and Arts Plaza. Triple-glazed custom-fritted glass volumes on the building’s upper floor house the college’s Artist in Residence Studio and the All Campus Conference center as amenities for the larger campus community.

This article originally appeared in the issue of .

Featured

  • Texas A&M Opens First Building at Fort Worth Campus, Breaks Ground on Research Facility

    The Texas A&M University System marked a major milestone in the development of its Fort Worth campus by opening its first completed academic building and breaking ground on a second facility designed to expand research and industry collaboration.

  • California High School Opens New Classroom Building for 7th-, 8th-Graders

    Santa Rosa City Schools in Santa Rosa, Calif., recently announced the completion of a new classroom building for Piner High School. As the campus transitions to a Junior/Senior High School, the facility will play home to the school’s new population of seventh- and eighth-grade students.

  • Opportunity by Design Framework

    Opportunity by Design

    Educational improvement efforts often focus on curriculum, instruction, assessment, professional development, and intervention systems while treating the physical school building as background. But school design is not a passive backdrop to learning — it is a structural lever for equity.

  • Missouri Child Development Center Completes $2.3M Expansion

    The Urban Sprouts Child Development Center in St. Louis, Mo., recently announced the completion of a $2.3-million expansion and adaptive reuse project, according to a news release. The new space includes a retail café, outdoor learning space, and a support office building.