Showing posts with label Midd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Midd. Show all posts

Midd-Sized Model

An interesting insight into Middlebury College's building plan _JI

Vermont's most design-conscious campus hits the wall
BY DONALD KREIS - Seven Days - Dec. 4-11, 2002

    Middlebury College professor Glenn Andres still recalls the day he picked up Robert Venturi at the airport and drove him to campus for a visit. As Andres remembers it, the famous Philadelphia architect-author got out of the car, took one look at the place, and declared: “You have what everyone thinks an American campus looks like but almost never does. It would be very easy to mess this up.”

    Nearly $140 million in controversial new construction later, Andres knows better than anyone how right Venturi was. As a professor of architectural history, he is ideally positioned to evaluate how wealthy institutions use their building resources. And, as a part-time member of Middlebury’s facilities planning department, he has been party to the school’s recent architectural decision making.

    So, when Andres invited Vermont architects and architecture students to campus last month, more than 100 of them showed up — presumably hoping that Andres and his colleagues would explain some of the recent choices that have transformed Middlebury from the bucolic campus Venturi saw to what it is today. The place is ringed by a series of fortress-like new buildings that seem to suggest Middlebury College is a kind of medieval estate in Addison County. But Andres’ talk was not about feudalism; it was about Middlebury College in a struggle — with its neighbors, with the limitations and challenges of its picture-perfect setting, with its architects and with itself.

    Andres is loyal; he said nothing critical about his employer. He simply told his visitors the story that began back in the mid-1980s, when Venturi arrived to interview for the job of designing the College’s new Center for the Performing Arts. Despite Venturi’s memorable assessment of Middlebury’s physical virtues, the commission went to Hugh Hardy of Hardy, Holtzman Pfeiffer Associates of New York.

    Hardy looked at the site of the project and instantly fell in love with the building nearby, Le Chateau. So he designed the performing arts center as a tribute to Middlebury’s maison française, mimicking its steep roofline and pinnacled turrets.

    But then the college trustees decided that the spot next to Le Chateau was too small; they insisted on moving the whole complex across campus, to a site on South Main Street beside the field house. Since this neighbor is an ugly recycled airplane hangar, contextualism was out of the question. Hardy’s homage to the French renaissance remained, but his design, while rich with architectural meaning and full of luxurious performance spaces, has never functioned as intended. According to Andres, the building has been underused because only the showplaces — theaters, galleries, etc. — were moved across campus, while the classrooms and other traditional facilities were left behind in existing buildings adjacent to the original site.

    This debacle got college officials thinking there ought to be more logic governing building choices than the momentary and potentially whimsical preferences of trustees or designers. So they hired an alumnus, David Wallace of Wallace Floyd Associates in Boston, to put together a comprehensive master plan that would guide Middlebury’s future expansion. His first draft was finished in 1995.

    Wallace’s plan proposed minimizing impacts, maintaining the campus’s unique qualities, nurturing a close working relationship with the town and preserving views — the latter a particular imperative for a campus with rapture-inducing vistas of the famous mountain ranges to both the east and west. The plan identified an academic and social nucleus around the school’s McCullough Student Center and the adjacent Starr Library, which the College had singled out for a major expansion. All in all, it is a sensible and responsible blueprint.

    Unfortunately, Middlebury College has ignored much of what the plan holds dear, validating Venturi’s comment about the ease of messing up a great place.

    Down went the College’s ugly and unpopular Science Center, a big hunk of 1960s concrete brutalism that functioned as a giant barrier between Old Stone Row — the three iconic buildings that are the oldest on campus — and downtown. But now, inexplicably, the College is rebuilding the wall, in the form of a $40 million new library designed by New York’s Gwathmey Siegel & Associates.

    Middlebury “agonized over this one,” Andres said at his talk last month. The college required Robert Siegel and his colleagues to work through eight different design proposals before settling on the winner, which will present a face to campus that vaguely resembles a round Shaker Barn. To the town, the new library will present two big walls — more varied than the blunt façade of the old Science Center, but walls nevertheless.

    Gwathmey Siegel got the job on the strength of a proposal to transform the existing Starr Library by tearing down all but the century-old Beaux Arts core and surrounding it with a curved addition. The Shaker Barn idea made some sense in this context, which would have kept the library right where the master planners thought it should be. But the college’s trustees had other ideas. This led to pitched battles with townsfolk before the Middlebury Planning Board, with neighbors concerned about noise, light pollution and the big box of a building.

    The college hosted, and videotaped, a town meeting before Gwathmey Siegel started the design. “The architects took it home and memorized every line of it,” Andres recalled. This speaks well of the architects and the process. But it’s useless if the real decision makers ignore the public input.

    A similar scenario unfolded with the Ross Commons complex, designed by Tai Soo Kim Associates of Hartford. The new residential and dining complex, which recently opened on the western edge of campus, ran squarely up against the master plan’s imperative to preserve Adirondack views. Kim thought a transparent glass bridge would work nicely to preserve the views and connect his complex to the existing Ross Commons dorms to the north. But as built, the design brought the bridge down to earth and includes triple-glazed glass that leaves the walkway opaque and wall-like.

    Seen from the east, the campus once offered a breathtaking mountain vista punctuated by small buildings. Now, there are just a few feet of open space between the Ross Commons complex and Bicen-tennial Hall — the science building completed for the school’s 200th anniversary in 2000.

    The monstrous “Bi Hall” itself has been controversial. With a 215,000 square feet, the building now houses 40 percent of the school’s classrooms. Centralizing so much of a small, traditional liberal arts college in one huge building is the very opposite of the classic, American campus feeling Venturi experienced when he visited. How did this happen?

    Andres admitted in his lecture that many — including townsfolk who live within sight of the college’s now-looming western skyline — find the scale of Bi Hall disturbing. Yet the commissioning of such a building was “not because of megalomania,” Andres insisted. The size is purely a function of efficiency, he suggested; separating the functions into a series of smaller structures would have required 25 percent more building.

    This echoes the line taken in the Middlebury Magazine, the school’s official organ. The cover story of the Fall 2002 issue concedes that some have blasted Bi Hall for its vastness, but claims that “if critics of the building could hear faculty members talk about how it was designed around their input… their opinions might moderate.” The architects, James Collins and Bob Schaeffer of Payette Associates in Boston, “stood out precisely because of a willingness to meet real needs rather than displaying an egoistic insistence on an aesthetic concept,” the magazine noted.

    But sometimes, architectural egotism is precisely what is needed. A good architect will listen carefully when meeting with the prospective users of a new building — like Bi Hall’s faculty denizens. But this same architect ought to be outspoken and persistent when dealing with out-of-town trustees who are inclined to wield their checkbooks in favor of choices that are harmful or arbitrary — such as placing a big building right at the crest of a hill.

    Finally, egotism in architects is well worth suffering by clients like Middlebury College. Hugh Hardy may or may not be more egotistical than his counterparts at Payette, but his Center for the Performing Arts is intriguing and beautiful. Payette’s Bi Hall is an unsightly parody of the signature Greek Revival façade of Old Chapel, flanked by wings of repetitive windows and granite that are more evocative of a prison than a college.

    Design divisiveness in Middlebury is not restricted to campus. This spring, Middlebury’s voters said no to a plan to move their cramped Town Hall out of downtown and into the strip-mall district south of the village on Route 7. The College had offered to donate the new site and to buy the old one for $3 million. It had hoped to tear down the old Town Hall, which occupies a wedge of land between College and South Main streets just at the edge of the school’s property and replace it with a lawn and a “Middlebury College” sign. In a protracted stand-off fraught with symbolism, locals turned the trustees down.

    This is not just a town-gown problem; the conflict over how the campus should grow and change also rages within. The Ross Commons project, for example, is an ambitious program to transform the school into five residential communities and thereby move Middlebury away from its historic fraternity-based social life. So far, the effort at social engineering has inspired skepticism.

    “Student reaction,” the Middlebury Campus student newspaper editorialized this fall, “remains complicated and, in some cases, very negative.” According to the paper, there is an “artificial air” to these communities, with students migrating from commons to commons in search of the best accommodations.

    If the students are behaving like real-estate shoppers, perhaps it is because they must part with $39,500 for a year of college. That price tag may also explain why the new dining hall at Ross Commons resembles a restaurant, with curved ceilings of locally harvested wood, next to an indoor dorm-to-dining walkway. Where once the College could simply assume it was attracting students who enjoyed the outdoors, even in cold weather, now it apparently feels obliged to offer resort-type amenities.

    Middlebury’s architectural ambivalence rears itself in another, less obvious, sense. In organizing an effort to engage Vermont architects in dialogue about the College, Andres clearly understands that such discourse is more than just good public relations; it can ground the College’s architectural choices in more indigenous sensibilities. But he could not coax the real decision makers — people like Executive Vice President for Facilities Planning David Ginevan, College President John McCardell or any of the trustees whose veto power is paramount — into participating.

    There’s one positive sign. The next big residential-dining project, Atwater Commons, is rising behind Le Chateau. The site is actually designated in the master plan as appropriate for such expansion. Designed by Kieran Timberlake Associates of Philadelphia, this might be the best example of architectural art at Middlebury College since the Greek Revival of the 1820s.

    The two dorm buildings frame the back of the Chateau, but in a gently non-symmetrical manner that responds to the topography. In form, these buildings pay tribute to the oldest building on campus, the beautifully austere Painter Hall, adding a syncopated window pattern that is distinctly contemporary. Adjacent, but not connected by an indoor walkway, is a delightfully radical exclamation point of a building — an oval dining hall, surrounded by what Andres calls “corrugated windows” and capped with a sod roof. This design strives to blur the distinction between the building and its earthly setting.

    If Middlebury College keeps building such structures, critics might be silenced. Good architecture speaks for itself.

    Donald Kreis, an attorney who writes frequently about architecture, graduated from Middlebury College in 1980.

Resume as of July 1996

James Jeffrey Inglis
PO Box 242
Middlebury, VT 05753 USA
+1-802-388-9511
jeff.inglis@pobox.com
http://pobox.com/~jeff.inglis/


Objectives | Employment Experience | Published Works | Technology Experience |
University Level Education | Skills and Activities | References

OBJECTIVES

To offer expertise, advice, and assistance in design, development, and implementation of technology, to educational institutions and teachers. To improve the prevalence of effective instructional materials in classrooms. To improve the proficiency and comfort of educators with technology, and to help them find pedagogically appropriate ways of using technology in their classrooms. To assist institutions with developing effective instructional technology plans and programs, and to aid them in implementing effective strategies for educational uses of technology.

Back to top


EMPLOYMENT EXPERIENCE

Language Technology User Support Specialist, Middlebury College Language Schools

September 1995-July 1996

  • Supported faculty developing multimedia language teaching software.
  • Instructor, Mellon Technology Workshops and Residencies.
  • Assisted with designing, outlining, and writing of grant proposals.
  • Member of cutting-edge design/evangelism/development team.
  • Use, instruction, and support of high-end hypermedia tools.
  • Operations management for daily Language Schools technology needs.
  • Coordination of campus-wide hardware/software installation and support.
  • Configuration and maintenance of 55-station Macintosh teaching labs.

Chair, Language Pedagogy Task Force, Middlebury College

September 1995-July 1996

  • Appointed by College President, elected by Task Force members.
  • Task Force members were senior administration and faculty.
  • Brought Task Force to successful final agreement on difficult issues of politics and pedagogy.
  • Wrote and edited report to the College President detailing current language pedagogy at Middlebury, and our plans for the future.
  • Kept minutes and Task Force records; served as document repository.
  • Designed, conducted, and compiled a survey of the student body.

Interactive Learning Center Assistant, Middlebury College Language Schools

June 1995-August 1995

  • Assistance of faculty developing multimedia language teaching software.
  • Technical support of CALICO and Mellon language technology conferences.
  • Networked Macintosh teaching lab configuration and maintenance.
  • Technical support of faculty and departmental machines.

Computer Consultant, Middlebury College

January 1992-May 1995

  • Supervision of 30 student consultants supporting students, faculty, and staff.
  • Networked IBM teaching lab configuration and maintenance.
  • LAN troubleshooting: Novell NetWare v3.11 and AppleTalk.
  • Programming and support of custom software, individual & collaborative efforts in Excel and FoxBase for 5 College departments.

Instructor, Winter Term Class, Middlebury College

January 1995

  • Academic Research Using the Internet:
    • A class using the capability of the Internet for searching, information retrieval, and as a resource for academic use supplemental to a library.
  • Class home page: http://pobox.com/~jeff.inglis/research/class/

Back to top


PUBLISHED WORKS

Rudolph

An automated scanner, disinfectant, and inoculator against the merryxmas virus, which is a virus infecting HyperCard stacks. Rudolph is a collaborative effort between myself and Jim Rodda. He did the graphics, and I wrote the code for Rudolph. It is a full-feature anti-virus program, permitting unattended operation, verbose logging of activity, prevention against future infection, and scanning of entire drives, folders, or even individual HyperCard stacks. Rudolph is distributed on the InfoMac CD archive by Pacific Hi-Tech, Inc., in the InfoMac archives at Stanford University, and on ftp.flannet.middlebury.edu.

AddSIVC

AddSIVC is a HyperCard stack which installs Simple Internet Version Control capability into existing HyperCard stacks. This automates and facilitates software upgrades for users, and information on the user base for product developers. Developed by Chris W. Johnson at the University of Texas, SIVC was implemented in C and Pascal when I undertook to build a HyperCard implementation. AddSIVC is distributed in the InfoMac archives at Stanford University and from Chris's own site at UTexas.

QTKanji

QTKanji is a project of the Language Schools technology team in collaboration with academic colleagues in Japan,and the Japanese Ministry of Education. QTKanji teaches students how to draw the Kanji characters used in written Japanese. It contains a large database of QuickTime movies demonstrating how to draw the characters, and permits extraction from that database of certain characters to make up a lesson for students, who are permitted to draw, on paper or on screen, the intended character. QTKanji is in use at Middlebury College, and has been distributed to several colleges and universities in the US.

Back to top


TECHNOLOGY EXPERIENCE

Multimedia

  • Adobe Photoshop, Avid Premiere, Adobe Videoshop, Macromedia Director.
  • Still image and video processing.
  • Project design, layout, development.

Operating Systems

  • Proficient with MacOS, Windows95, Windows 3.1, and DOS.
  • Holder of two Apple-registered application creator types.
  • Significant experience with VMS, UNIX C Shell.

Internet

Software Packages

  • Intimately familiar with NisusWriter, Microsoft Word (including macros), WordPerfect, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint.

Programming Languages

  • Most recent work with HyperTalk, FoxPro, Microsoft Excel, and HTML.
  • Have also programmed in FoxBase, dBase, Pascal, and ANSI C.

Back to top


UNIVERSITY LEVEL EDUCATION

Back to top


SKILLS AND ACTIVITIES

Photography

  • Assistant Photo Editor for Kaleidoscope (College yearbook).
  • Staff Photographer for Campus (College weekly newspaper).
    • Experienced color and black and white photographer.
    • Processing and printing of black and white film and paper.

Leadership/Outdoors

  • Middlebury Mountain Club Guide
    • Experienced hiker, backpacker, snowshoer. Planner and leader of numerous trips for groups numbering up to 12, varying from day hikes to four nights.

Back to top


REFERENCES

  • Clara Yu, Mellon Project Director, Middlebury College Language Schools, Middlebury, VT 05753 USA
  • Ronald Liebowitz, Vice President of the College, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT 05753 USA
  • Amy Barna, Language Schools Coordinator, Middlebury College Language Schools, Middlebury, VT 05753 USA
  • Marsha DeBonis, Special Projects Coordinator, Middlebury College Language Schools, Middlebury, VT 05753 USA
  • John Elder, Professor of English and Environmental Studies, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT 05753 USA
  • Paul Monod, Associate Professor of History, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT 05753 USA

Back to top