Spring 2007 Newsletter · Issue 29
A New University Center
By Michael Hill P’07
The first time you visited Wesleyan, probably with a high school student in tow, there was no doubt in your mind what constituted the center of campus. It was that big open space, what you later learned was Andrus Field and Foss Hill.
With the scoreboard perched atop Fayerweather Hall on one side, the athletic field in its proper orientation beneath the library that was on the other side, that large swath of green had an iconic feel, almost an ur-text of the New England liberal arts college.
The only problem is that, as Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland, Calif., there was no there there.
Unless there was a game or some event on Andrus Field, or a covering of cold snow or warm sunshine on Foss Hill, there was no reason to be there. It was a place you walked by or across, but rarely to. The space might have been the center of campus, but it was not its centerpiece.
The Usdan University Center is supposed to change all that when it opens this fall. It hugs the northeast corner of Andrus Field and, if it works anything like it is supposed to, it will be more than a building; it will be a transformative experience for the Wesleyan campus.
The basics are simple. Usdan will consolidate most campus dining under one roof. Freshmen will no longer be segregated in Mocon, which will be closed. (Mocon’s interesting circular space seems destined for demolition, which is an unfortunate byproduct of Usdan’s opening.) Davenport, and its myriad dining facilities will also close. That building, always awkward as a student center —it has what interior designers refer to as “flow problem”—will be converted to academic uses.
Wesleyan president Doug Bennet says that the inadequacies of Davenport spurred Usdan’s development.
“It’s five stories high,” he says of Davenport. “One of the purposes of a campus center is to walk in and see which of your friends are there. You couldn’t do that. And it was very inefficient dining. Except on the very coldest days, students were going in and getting food and coming out on the campus to eat, as opposed to sitting down in a place and hopefully having some extended conversation. We were interested in remedying that problem.”
But Bennet says that the new University Center should do much more than that.“I think Usdan is going to be very unifying in several ways,” he says. “It is a central place for everybody to meet and dine, which we don’t have now. The mailboxes will all be central. That’s an important part of it.
“The second unifying feature is what we are doing with the sight lines,” he says. “The campus used to be blocked up with the old buildings there. But now you can see across campus, from the science building on one end to the arts center on the other. It will give you a completely different view of campus.“
In addition to dining, Usdan will also have a variety of meeting rooms.
“It will really provide a location to help bring us together as a community,” says Rick Culliton, the University Center director and dean of campus programs. “It will attract and draw people together in a way we haven’t been able to do at Wesleyan with most of our campus activities and dining scattered into different buildings.”
But, again, if it works right, it will be more than a place to eat and meet. It will be a reflection of what Wesleyan is all about, a place that allows people to interact in intelligent, challenging, stimulating and democratic ways.
“One of our goals was to enhance the curricular activities here at Wesleyan through an academic and social oriented space,” says Alan Rubacha who has been the project’s construction consultant. “That’s what guided our design process.
“We wanted a central location, a dining space and a meeting space, a place to see and be seen in formal and informal settings, socially and academically,” he says.
So, as Bennet points out, Usdan will provide the campus something it lacks — a place for students and faculty to eat under one roof, both together and separately. Or for a faculty member to bring an entire class to share a meal and a discussion.
L to R: John Usdan, Joshua and Simon Usdan, Eva Colin Usdan, Samuel Usdan, Adam Usdan, Hannah Usdan, Andrea Pollack Usdan.
Rubacha says what he calls Wesleyan’s zeitgeist directed the entire project, including the choice of architects Kallman, McKinnell & Wood of Boston.
“We interviewed a bunch of architects,” Rubacha says. “We were looking for something that fit not only Wesleyan’s existing architecture, but also its sort of persona. Some student center architecture is playful, which is fine for some campuses, but does not really fit Wesleyan. We were looking for something intelligent and thoughtful.”
Usdan sits in the actual geographic center of Wesleyan’s campus. It is supposed to reach out to the scattered edges—the arts center, the fitness center, the science building, the low rises, the Butts — and pull them all together.
Rubacha says it will change the way people walk across campus, bringing them from the outside of college row to the inside, a move that in itself has a unifying function while cementing the identity of the Andrus field area as the center of campus.
And, as Culliton points out, the Usdan terraces will overlook Andrus field. “On game days, they will provide an anchor for athletic events that the campus has not had before,” he says.
Rubacha says that the architects were allowed to explore a variety of possibilities in planning the structure, from demolishing the entire corner to saving every building. In the end, the cage building came down, but Fayerweather, with its distinctive turrets was saved.
“Fayerweather is going to be back in its 1892 configuration, with a large hall that serves many functions,” Rubacha says.
“That space can be configured for standing receptions, for seated lectures, for some sort of performances,” Culliton says. “It’s a pretty versatile, multi-use space.”
Bennet says that what Usdan and the renovated Fayerweather will do for the campus is more important now than it was a decade or so ago.
“I think there are all sorts of reasons these days to try to pull people together,” he says. “Because of the influence of online communications, you need a place for people to find each other.
“We are reinforcing that by creating a community-wide option for getting together, and the sense that this place now has a beautiful building in its center, not the scruffy old building we now have as a student center,” Bennett says.
If it works as planned, this fall there will be a there there.