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Donald Maurice Kreis
"Entrepreneurial" - a word frequently used
by people associated with Champlain College - is usually a harbinger
of architectural disaster. When those who fancy themselves entrepreneurs
build, they tend to do so with a fast return on the invested buck
in mind, which inevitably involves design and construction on the
cheap.
Thus a tip of the cap - or perhaps the cupola - is
due Champlain College, which prides itself on being a scrappy, entrepreneurial
institution. Champlain has figured out that good architecture attracts
students and is thus worth the investment for a school that is striving
to become the high-tech, higher education institution of the future.
This has significant consequences for Burlington -
particularly the residential neighborhood the school inhabits. Champlain
College is poised to begin a $30 million construction project that,
if completed as planned, will add three major new buildings to the
historic Hill District. Construction on the $10 million Center for
Global Business and Technology was slated to begin on Maple Street,
until a last-minute Act 250 appeal (lodged on procedural grounds)
stayed the groundbreaking. A new $13 million Student Life Complex,
to replace the dismal and boxily un-contextual Hamrick Hall, is
advancing through its permitting processes. And, while College officials
say the Main Street Suites and Conference Center is presently on
hold (presumably to allow them to finish raising the necessary $6
million), they promise the project will move forward.
All three buildings are the work of venerable Burlington
architect Tom Cullins of Truex Cullins & Partners, who also
designed Champlain College’s Miller Information Commons, completed
in 1998. So Miller is a good place to start if one wishes to forecast
whether the three new buildings will be welcome additions to the
cityscape.
At most other schools, Miller would be known as the
"library." But Champlain, which wishes to embrace technology
and educate students in using it, was not interested in concealing
the fact that it has few books to lay on the stacks and thus opted
to build a big computer center. The challenge was the chosen site
on Summit Street, between two elegant, dignified century-old Victorian
mansions-turned dormitories (one of which, Aiken Hall, was designed
by A.B. Fisher, the dean of Victorian Vermont residential architects),
and directly adjoining a tranquil garden that had long been a cherished
neighborhood spot.
Cullins, with the able assistance of his associate
Mike McCann, put the building’s few stacks in the basement
and, above ground, crafted an edifice that manages to pay homage
to its Victorian neighbors while embracing a distinctly contemporary
design sensibility - all while attaining a sense of beauty and harmony
that makes Miller a fitting backdrop for the public garden it adjoins.
You’d think that any competent architect, and
any forward-thinking academic institution with historic buildings,
would do these things automatically - but one need not look far
to discover failed attempts. Middlebury College strove to evoke
the feel of its distinctive signature building - Old Chapel - but
ended up creating, in Bicentennial Hall, an outsized grotesque parody
whose fortress-like ambiance disfigures that College’s skyline.
The University of Vermont turned its glorious Billings Library into
an under-utilized relic. It did so by constructing an unremarkable
addition and rechristening the complex a student center, thus sucking
the life out of a masterpiece by H.H. Richardson, the greatest American
architect of the 19th Century, with most real activity consigned
to the addition.
And right at Champlain College is a cascade of graceless
or nearly graceless buildings of the late 20th Century that try
but fail to resonate with their historic neighbors. The aforesaid
Hamrick does this by arrogantly ignoring its context, because architects
of the 50s and 60s thought they were reinventing architecture from
scratch. Two 1980s buildings, Alumni Auditorium and the Hauke Center,
apparently proceed from the equally dubious hypothesis that one
can make a modern building look sufficiently Victorian just by slapping
on a big pitched roof. Oddest of all is the Joyce Learning Center,
whose east and west facades look like big green wooden billboards
framed by brickwork and a pitched roof.
Cullins says he avoided these pitfalls by bearing
in mind that what makes Victorian architecture great is its elegant
details - the textures evoked by green-painted shingles juxtaposed
against brick and pink granite, the elaborate fenestration, the
division of the building mass itself into discrete modules that
form a harmonious composition just as a good sculpture or still-life
painting does. But rather than imitate these things, Cullins strove
to create "current and future-oriented" details, using
technologies and gestures uninvented in the time of A.B. Fisher.
Principally this occurs in the use of glass. Circular
windows are playful, plentiful and artfully positioned. A stair
tower overlooking the garden is housed within a rounded curtain
wall of glass. Particularly in the upper levels, where the views
of Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks are among the best in town,
glazing is likewise ubiquitous and welcome.
Although Cullins does not use the word "post-modern"
to describe Miller, not wanting to associate his creation with the
discredited stylistic retreat into the past characteristic of 1980s
design, the building does achieve its novelty in part by some odd
allusions to architectural history. The brackets that seem to support
the roof are characteristic of the eclectic "stick" style
that flourished in the 1860s and 70s, whereas the overall rectangular
building form, with its temperately pitched roof culminating in
a ring of overhanging eaves, evokes the early prairie-style homes
of Frank Lloyd Wright. Adding these elements to a victorian context
is amusing and ultimately successful. If you want proof that Cullins
can design in an unabashedly modern idiom check out his U.S. border
station at the north end of Interstate 89.
Of the three new buildings, the student center promises
to be the most interesting. McCann calls the design "a real
shoe-horn" given the designated site on the tightly-planned
campus. Thus, much of the needed square footage is underground,
with atriums and skylights used to bring natural light into the
athetic facilities at subterranean level. The form of the building
is more straighforward modern than Miller, and the ghost of Hamrick
will persist in the form of a flat roof above the gymnasium. The
architects’ idea is to make this roof an earthen one, since
the sloping site could make this space accessible as a lawn or garden.
The building is engineered to make this possible if Champlain ever
raises the money. Here’s hoping it does. Earth makes great
insulation and creating architecture in this manner literally makes
buildings at one with their surrounding landscape. That would be
so refreshingly un-Victorian that it could almost awaken A.B. Fisher
from his own subterranean digs!
If you live on Harrington Terrace you cannot be joyous
over the prospect of your intimate residential mews being transformed
into a collegiate thoroughfare when the Main Street Suites and Conference
Center is built at what is now the terrace’s dead end. Whether
or not the students make good neighbors, they will inhabit good
architecture. Cullins massed the building so that its two main elements
align with, and thus punctuate, the rows of tightly packed houses
that line Harrington Terrace. But in place of the stultifying symmetry
this plan could generate, there is an artful arrangement of brick,
clapboard, stone pediment and porch that make this building the
most pleasingly composed of this firm’s work at Champlain.
This will be a dignified and energetic stride by the school onto
the prominent Main Street stage now dominated by UVM.
Only the new Center for Global Business and Technology
warrants some concerned skepticism. Consistent with the college’s
long-term campus plan, this building will close the quadrangle formed
by Miller, its two adjoining mansions and Hauke. Maple Street travellers
will likely miss the open space, with its welcoming hillside lawn
leading to a sweeping view of Miller and its west-facing tower that
the school and its architects want to read as a kind of lighthouse
of knowledge. To make the new business and technology center fully
contextual, the architects had to replicate the awkwardly aggressive
roof line of Hauke, to which it will be connected by an enclosed
pedestrian bridge.
Aligned with this bridge is a loggia along the south
face of the building. The combination of these two features may
be the element that makes this addition to the campus a success
from a visual standpoint. Much as the courtyard of a medieval cloister
is often surrounded by such protected pathways, this element can
add a sense of serenity while providing welcome shelter from the
elements for those who must pass through the quad.
The Cullins buildings at Champlain are not exciting
enough to win national architectural awards; those laurels are reserved
for projects that swoop and soar in the manner of Frank Gehry’s
Guggenheim in Spain. But, collectively, this work achieves something
more remarkable - solid architecture that adds to its historic neighborhood
without merely imitating the established fabric.
According to Cullins, you can thank Champlain’s
president, Roger Perry, for waging a successful struggle against
expediency. Perry, in turn, credits his family heritage. "I
was brought up in a family business that specializes in paintings
and restoration," he explains, so love of good buildings is
naturally one of his presidential priorities.
Presidents notwithstanding, many a great campus building
project has been ruined by a school’s trustees, who shoulder
much fundraising responsibility and thus tend to have veto power
over architectural decisions. Along those lines, Perry refers will
glee to a trustee discussion he witnessed at a point when the Miller
project had gone over budget. The inevitable call to scale back
was made, and Perry recalls one trustee - he won’t say which
one - proclaiming: "Gentlemen, this is no dump that you and
I build commercially."
Amen! Some day, perhaps the commercial districts of
Taft Corners and South Burlington will also be built for the ages.
Meantime, we can thank Champlain College for doing so, asking only,
with all due respect: Will it ever get rid of those dorky looking
signs with the fake pediments?
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