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At Williams College in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, SO – IL has designed a new home for the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA).
Today, WCMA is located in the Lawrence Hall building built in 1986 by Charles Moore. Once SO – IL’s new building is completed in 2027, WCMA will relocate to the first purpose-built residence on campus. After WCMA exits the Moore Building, a rezoning study will be conducted to determine good future uses for Lawrence Hall.
Renderings from SO – IL show a misty, low-lying structure with an aluminum tile roof that undulates and flows within a pastoral landscape, mimicking the nearby Berkshire Mountains. The interior of the upcoming museum will feature naturally lit galleries and partition walls made of wood and gray brick. The undulating roof cantilevers out to form a “porch” perfect for observing nature. The courtyard garden is located at the center of the museum’s two gallery arms. All these elements form a profoundly humanistic building located in one of the most picturesque areas of the country.
SO – IL co-founders Liu Jing and Florian Edenburg said that during the design process they carefully studied Charles Moore’s Lawrence Hall and attempted to emulate its postmodernist qualities. “We want to create paths and moments of choice,” Edenbaugh said at a press conference celebrating the museum’s opening alongside WCMA Director Pamela Franks. “So when you walk through the gallery, there is no single route. As a visitor, you have the opportunity to decide how you move. You can wander, explore and come back.”
Franks added that museum officials are excited that “SO-IL’s response has been so profound and imaginative.” [Williams’] The goal is to center the entire campus around the arts while integrating the Williams College experience into a dynamic interaction with the wider world and becoming a more visible and accessible presence among the Berkshires’ outstanding cultural attractions. “
Reed Hilderbrand is the landscape architect on the project and PDR is the executive architect.When completed, the building will display more than 15,000 works of art from the Williams College Art Museum permanent collection Covers 15,000 square feet of display space; resulting in a total of 76,800 square feet of new space.
Artworks on display include ancient Assyrian reliefs, 19th-century Expressionist paintings by Maurice Brazil Prendergast, and more contemporary works by Richard Hawkins . The building has approximately 40,000 square feet on a single floor and 30,000 square feet on the ground floor. The Williams College Art Museum will feature an auditorium for lectures and community meetings, art studio space, a café, a 6,400-square-foot learning center, a digital humanities classroom, a seminar room and an “object lab.” .
Giving an insight into SO-IL’s design process, Idenburg said, “Intimacy was a big part of the scheme. The fact that it is a 76,000-square-foot building made creating intimate art-viewing spaces a challenge. We learned from the work of residential architects how to create intimate spaces where students and faculty can appreciate art.”
Edenberg added that the scheme consists of a series of smaller-scale pavilions that share a common roof, dividing the space into more intimate settings. A total of five pavilions offer north-facing galleries. Visitors will enter from the roundabout via the main entrance from the south. “As you can imagine, we went through many iterations of how the building was organized,” Liu said.
After its founding in 1793, Williams College established one of the most competitive art history programs in the world.Today, its campus buildings It is a hodgepodge of Victorian and 20th century architecture: The Architects Collaborative (TAC), Ann Beha, William Rawn, the Cambridge Seven and Shepley Bulfinch all designed several buildings there; Polshek Partnership (now Ennead Architects), Mitchell – So are Giurgola Associates, Harry Weese, and postmodernist guru Charles Moore.
SO – IL’s design will blend seamlessly with Williams’ historic and medieval surroundings while inevitably becoming a contemporary statement for the 21st century. When the building opens in 2027, SO – IL will join a distinguished list of past architects who have made a wider contribution to Berkshire’s already stunning architectural portfolio.
Today, Berkshire County is known around the world for its natural beauty, idyllic villages and famous residents who preferred Walt Whitman’s cloistered lifestyle to the red carpet. Musician Arlo Guthrie lived there and starred in the 1967 cult classic film Alice’s Diner, set in Stockbridge and starring Pete Seeger. So did conductors Yo-Yo Ma, James Taylor and many other artists.Before Seager’s death, he himself like to play at the Lenox Inn, Tanglewood and other local music venues.
Over the past few decades, Berkshire County has also hired leading architects to build new buildings there and transformed its shuttered factories into art museums to help revitalize a local economy long affected by post-industrialism. . In 2014, Tadao Ando completed new building at the Clark Institute. MASS MoCA, Bruner/Cott, Frank Gehry, Venturi & Scott Brown Associates and SOM Everyone works on the master plan.
Now, SO – IL is the latest big-name studio on the list. “Our office has a history of 15 years,” Liu Jing said at the launch press conference. “This project is very informative and a very good opportunity for our company. It is a great honor to be considered for this project.” In her speech, Liu spoke from the heart about adding Williams rich What legacy means to a company. “I remember the first time we visited the Charles Moore Building,” Liu said. “There’s something really lovely about it.”
“Designing a university art museum is one of the most exciting tasks we as architects can imagine. Reconciling synergies between the past, present and future allows us to create a home where students, faculty, community and collections come together,” Liu and Edenberg said in a joint statement.
SO – IL continued: “We believe that a space is as much a teacher as the programs it houses, so we are delighted to collaborate with WCMA to design a building where different modes of learning and appreciation of art can intersect, coexist and reshape each other. The walls do not limit the concept of this museum, but rather the inviting gesture of a large roof delineating the spaces where these interactions take place. We hope that the building will become a welcoming beacon, between the campus and the outside world, for this Contribute to a beautiful landscape.”
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