Oberlander and Towers both also graduated from Smith.) But over the years, factors such as infill construction, piecemeal property acquisitions, and the intrusion of cars and scattered parking lots have created circulation disconnects, pedestrian-vehicle conflict points, interrupted views, and other problems. (Shavaun Towers, FASLA, was then the college landscape architect. The college did adopt a plan in 1996, meant to channel the Olmsted sensibility, created by Rolland/Towers (precursor to Towers|Golde) in collaboration with Cornelia Hahn Oberlander. It was not implemented in the core campus, though his concept was used for the Quad, a symmetrical, architecturally traditional dorm and courtyard complex. Courtesy MNLA.Ī 1914 plan by John Nolen proposed overlaying a more formal organization. And a huge opportunity.” Smith campus map. (Smith’s campus is a Level III Arboretum, which designates sites with at least 500 species of trees, a curator, and substantial educational programming.) “But they’re all end of life, 120 years old.
“We do have our original tree set,” Weisbord says. Curving drives and some lawn-and-tree spaces survive, though many views they would have privileged are now obstructed.
The original 1893 design was by the Olmsted firm, in its picturesque aesthetic, but it was not fully implemented. Smith’s campus design had previously been addressed by a number of illustrious landscape architects, though their counsel wasn’t always taken, and it has been compromised by fragmentary incremental change. “You don’t go messing with this without significant engagement.” “The campus is deeply tied to the sense of identity of the institution,” Weisbord says. So, an unusually strong community input process accompanied the research for a new landscape master plan by MNLA, the firm of which Nielsen is a founding principal. It’s become an expectation,” says Dano Weisbord, the college’s associate vice president for campus planning and sustainability. There is a “culture of consultation and involvement. Studying at Smith encourages this inclination. Students feel a call to action,” says Signe Nielsen, FASLA, herself a 1972 Smith graduate. If a wrong can be righted, why not? “You’re at a stage in your life when you realize you’re part of a much bigger world, so your consciousness expands greatly. Many students at elite colleges like Smith are idealistic activists. It is called, without irony, Paradise Pond. The river was dammed to power mills, and the resulting oxbow impoundment, which now provides flood control, is a Smith icon, lending an elysian feel to views of the campus and the memories of generations of alumnae. The fourth side slopes down to a bend in a river, across which are the green expanses of a floodplain (the college sports field), a wooded ridge, and, in the near distance, the Holyoke and Tom mountains. Instead, on three sides it blends into adjacent residential streets and borders a commercial center. Its 147-acre campus lacks a defined boundary. The college has a close relationship with the city and region, physically and culturally. The town was also a significant locus of abolitionism and a node on the Underground Railroad. Several Northampton hospitals once specialized hopefully in “the water cure” for ailments like scarlet fever. In the 1840s, a short-lived utopian community tried raising silkworms there and spawned an improbable effort to grow sugar beets to undermine the South’s slavery-dependent agriculture economy.
Smith College is in Northampton, Massachusetts, a town of about 30,000 where idealistic visions flow luxuriant. Today the institution bearing her name enrolls some 2,100 female undergraduates (and a few hundred grad students, including some men). In 1871, Sophia Smith devoted an inherited fortune to realizing her dream, a women’s college to equal those for men. A proposal to renaturalize the river strikes some alumnae as too radical. By Jonathan Lerner Paradise Pond, a beloved Smith landmark, was formed by a dam on the Mill River. For new master plan, MNLA embraced Smith College’s ethos of participation.
0 kommentar(er)
