Professor Emeritus of Art History John Rhodes will lead the tour. “[Wellesley] was chosen simply because it has some outstanding, well-known modern architecture,” he wrote in an email. An authority on the College’s history, Professor Rhodes co-authored “The Landscape and Architecture of Wellesley College,” a book that describes the College’s 125-year development.
The New England chapter of DOCOMOMO, founded in 1997, tours colleges in the Boston area because they have been “incubators for new movements in architecture and planning, and this was particularly true in the immediate post-war era,” according to its website.
DOCOMOMO has toured the modernist architecture at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University. The tour will stop at Wellesley and Brandeis this weekend because of their physical proximity.
Wellesley and Brandeis are “two very different interpretations [of modernist architecture],” said David Fixler, President of DOCOMOMO-US/New England. Brandeis was completely conceived and designed in the postwar era, whereas Wellesley’s earliest buildings date from the 19th century and represent the Gothic architecture. The tour will contrast Wellesley’s modernist interventions with Brandeis’s entirely modernist design.
“[Wellesley has] very significant modern buildings,” Fixler said. He knows the campus well as he designed the Susan and Donald Newhouse Center—inside Green Hall—for the Humanities and has worked alongside Professor of Art Alice Friedman. “[But] Jewett alone makes it a destination.”
Fixler describes the Jewett Arts Center, built in 1958, as “an erudite interpretation of modernism.” Picking up on the context of the College, he notes that it merges Gothic with modernist architecture.
“Jewett was one of the most important commissions of Paul Rudolph’s career,” Director of New England Arts and Architecture Program Martha McNamara noted. Rudolph went on to become the dean of the Yale School of Architecture.
Although DOCOMOMO’s tour will focus heavily on the Jewett Arts Center, it will stop by Raphael Moneo’s Davis Museum and the Wang Campus Center, two more recent examples of modernism. “[The] Wang continues the tradition of modernism,” Fixler said. “But it is of a different era.”
The tour will also highlight other examples of modernist architecture at Wellesley, including the east campus dorms and the Science Center. The east campus dorms include Bates, McAfee and Freeman date back to the 1950s and are part of Coolidge Shepley Bulfinch and Abbot’s residential complex. The same architects built Harvard’s Lamont Library in 1949.
The tour will also highlight other examples of modernist architecture at Wellesley, including the east campus dorms and the Science Center. The east campus dorms include Bates, McAfee and Freeman date back to the 1950s and are part of Coolidge Shepley Bulfinch and Abbot’s residential complex. The same architects built Harvard’s Lamont Library in 1949.
Some students think the College’s blend of the old architecture with the new represents the College’s commitment to diversity and balance between tradition and innovation. “At the time Wellesley was first started, it pioneered the concept of women studying,” Tanu Naimpally’13 said. “It challenged tradition. [The modernist architecture is] new in the way that it’s progressive without abandoning the traditions of the past. Symbolically, the Science Center is a really interesting concept. It stands for what Wellesley is all about: fusing the new with the old and coming up with something completely its own.”
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