The View from Elm Street

Vol. 2 No. 21

The View from Elm Street
Smith College's Building Boom All but Walls out the Community

By Edward Shanahan

Motorists or pedestrians traveling along Elm Street in Northampton these days increasingly are confronted by a Maginot Line of structures blocking any interior view of a college campus which used to be far more welcoming.

Renovations to the Smith College Art Museum - now called the Brown Fine Arts Center - and the mass of steel looping around older Elm Street buildings for the eventual student center, all but shut out the eye and mind from any connection with the college which still exists somewhere behind this monument to steel, stylish design and money.

Dwarfed by the new and renovated structures are College Hall at the foot of Elm Street and St. James Church, an ecclesiastical island in the middle of Smith property.

In almost a symbolic way, the new construction finds the college turning its back on the rest of the community along the Route 9 artery.

Intentional or not, the college has erected a barrier to an easy commerce between town and gown, at least as reflected in its buildings.

We are not alone in our view that site lines and access to the campus are disappearing.

A recent article in the Boston Sunday Globe's travel section expresses a similar perspective.

Touring the Pioneer Valley as part of a revisitation of points of interest described in a WPA guide to Massachusetts originally published in the 1930s, the Globe writer offers the following:

"Smith College, described in great architectural detail, would be nearly unrecognizable today."

"The noble gates and the Colonial Georgian architecture remain, but other buildings in a mishmash of styles have sprung up higgledy-piggledy, crowding the verdant campus. It looks as if a giant has spilled his toy blocks all about, obscuring access to roads and pathways, congesting what was once a pastoral academic setting with too much brick and mortar."

I have absolutely no background in architecture and do not favor building new structures that appear to be old - as was done when the Helen Hills Hills Chapel was built in the 1950s to look like a Puritan church.

Yet, there is something oppressive, even antagonistic, about the scale of the art center and student center, which war with all surrounding structures and coarsen the Elm Street corridor. They do not invite passersby to stop, get out their cars and enter the campus on foot for a brief stroll. If you want to see the campus, your best bet is to drive its perimeter along College Lane and Green Street, find a scarce parking space, and walk into the campus. That's your best shot.

That's hardly the way to maintain cordial even warm relations with your friends and neighbors, or especially visitors to your college. You should be more open, more forthcoming. To promote public enjoyment, a campus should be more like a garden than a garrison, more like a park than a fortress.

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