Harvard Smith Campus Center is U.S. Building of the Week

The Richard A. & Susan F. Smith Campus Center at Harvard University was named the U.S. Building of the Week by world-architects!

Part of an ongoing university “Common Spaces” initiative, the new Smith Campus Center was designed to ensure its physical spaces foster the campus’s intellectual, cultural, and social experience and support the wider community. The project reconfigures the first, second, and tenth floors, reinterpreting the history and logic of Josep Lluis Sert’s architecture in a series of additions to, and removals from, the existing fabric to create a family of new internal spaces interspersed with a captured internal and external landscape.

Sert served as Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design from 1953 to 1969, during which time he designed the Holyoke Center across the street from Harvard Square and the gates to Harvard Yard. Now the Smith Campus Center, the administrative building was renovated by Hopkins Architects with Bruner/Cott Architects.

Read the full feature here.

 

 

MASS MoCA is MAAM’s 2019 Buildy Award Recipient

Congratulations to MASS MoCA on being honored for excellence in museum building as this year’s “Buildy” award recipient by the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums (MAAM)!

This national award recognizes the museum as an institution, its director and staff, and the building/design construction team whose completed museum construction projects demonstrate high achievement in the lessons of the Building Museums™ Symposium: careful, creative planning and diligent implementation, leading to institutional sustainability. It is awarded each year to the most outstanding recent museum building project. The purpose of the Buildy Award is to increase awareness within the field, and by the public at large, of the value of museums and the need for their ongoing rehabilitation and expansion to serve future generations.

The criteria for winning a Buildy includes originality of concept, advancement of the museum’s mission, high achievement in planning and process, green design and construction, community benefit and response, transformative impact, and much more. This award recognizes the museum leadership’s exemplary accomplishment through the three-decade process of completing their master plan for the museum.

MASS MoCA Director Joe Thompson will be accepting the award on March 1st at the annual Building Museums™ Symposium in Brooklyn, NY.

Read the full award announcement on the MAAM website.