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In the process of choosing an architect for the campus center at Wellesley College, the school administrators asked the short-listed firms not for conceptual sketches of proposed structures, but instead for analyses of potential sites. The emphasis on landscape instead of buildings might seem unusual, but at Wellesley, a passion for its 450-acre campus--a wooded terrain of rolling hills, gentle plateaus, and flat meadows along the northern edge of Lake Waban--dates to the school's founding in the 1870s. In 1902, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., as a consultant to the college, wrote a lengthy letter describing the campus as "not merely beautiful but with a marked individual character not represented so far as I know on the grounds of any other college in the country." The letter, urging the administrators to respect the "exceedingly intricate and complex topography" by building along ridges rather than across meadows, would profoundly affect Wellesley's physical development. The latest evidence of Olmsted's beneficial influence is the Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center.
Designed by the Atlanta firm of Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects, the 50,000-square-foot building rises on an escarpment overlooking a cattail-filled meadow that slopes down to the lake--a setting the great landscape architect would surely have approved. Moreover, as Mack Scogin, AIA, explains, the Olmstedian philosophy and its particular meaning at this women's college west of Boston have informed not just the building's placement, but also its design. "Wellesley has always rejected the idea of imposing any abstract or geometric order on the land," says Scogin. "They've chosen instead to value the natural and the irregular." As a result, you come to understand this campus neither easily nor quickly, but gradually, as you meander along its paths and tramp its hills and valleys. And so, Scogin adds, "Our idea was to embody in this project the values of the landscape--to make a place that draws you in, a place that you discover slowly, over time."
The architects' focus on a process of discovery resonated with Wellesley's leaders, who envisioned the building's program as open-ended and evolving. The clients admit that they were clearer about what they did not want than what they did: They did not want to pander to national campus-consumerist trends with a building devoted to cappuccino...