(soft music)
- It's been said that architecture makes time visible,
like layers of geologic strata.
You can see in an Amherst campus how that happens.
Attitudes change, technology changes, society changes,
pedagogical aims change.
These buildings are like cultural artifacts, Rosetta stones.
They tell us about their time.
And the interesting thing is they don't lie.
They speak the truth about what the values and the visions
of their creators were.
At Amherst, you can start with college row.
The most important building on the campus is Johnson Chapel.
It's an example of Greek revival architecture
that was popular in the United States
in the early years of the 19th century,
a temple like structure made of brick and wood
that faces west toward the Connecticut river,
which was the interstate highway of it's day,.
Simple, strong, muscular.
There's nothing frilly at all about it.
Johnson Chapel and College Row are citadels of moral virtue
that were supposed to cleanse a miserable world.
Interestingly enough, it doesn't have a steeple on top.
It has this two tiered almost wedding cake like tower.
Had it been, say a Gothic building with a steeple,
like the kind of architecture
that Amaris built in the 1870s,
the entire tone of college's architecture
would have been very different.
Johnson Chapel today reads
as a kind of almost secular structure,
like what you would see on Capitol hill in Washington.
Vincent Scully, the great Yale architectural historian
called architecture a continuing dialogue
between the generations,
which creates an environment developing across time.
And that's really what you see at Amherst,
that continuing dialogue between past and present
and ultimately future.
One of the fascinating things about the Amherst campus
is the reuse and reinvention of historic structures.
Converse was a library.
It's now the administration and a classroom building.
Morgan was a library and it's now an academic building.
Barrett was a gym, and it's now an academic building.
The finest example of this is Fairweather hall,
which was originally a Physics and Chemistry building.
It's the best building at Amherst
and really one of most influential beyond Johnson Chapel
evoking the importance of reason rather than faith.
Gorgeous orange, red brick, beautiful terracotta decoration,
a logia, three arches that form an entranceway
into the building. Horizontally proportioned
that contrast to the verticality of the Stearns Steeple.
The terracotta is really worth looking at closely.
You can see an egg and dark pattern.
You can see another detail called the dental,
which is tooth like.
You can see rosettes in the arches that formed a logia.
It's a hugely significant building here
because it was designed by the firm
of McKim, Mead and White, great New York architects
one of whose partners, William Ruthorford Mead
was an average graduate.
And it really sets the tone for the colleges architecture
for another 70 years,
McKim, Mead and White becomes the campus architect.
and they design numerable buildings here
from Kirby Theater to Converse Hall.
And that is one of the main factors
that leads to the harmonious character
of the campus's architecture.
When people think of architecture,
they often just think of individual structures,
brick and mortar, or steel and glass.
A good campus is more than the sum of its individual parts.
It's the combination of the buildings,
the landscape, the people,
and how all those things come together
to create a place,
a place that affects us in the present,
but also lingers in our memories and inspires us
as we look toward the future.
During world war II, Stanley king,
then the president of Amherst was out for a stroll
and was contemplating a future war Memorial
for the Amherst men who had died in World War I
and World War II.
He looked out over the Holyoke Range
and saw in his eye, a war memorial
that would capture that view
and also look out over playing fields
that would memorialize the team spirit
that had contributed to the victories
of World War I and World War II.
The landscape architect,
Arthur Schurcliff combined with a campus architect,
James Callum Smith to create something very special,
a Memorial that very much recalls the prototype
of a Greek theater.
It's a continuation of the main quad yet a zone unto itself.
We see that in the steps that lead down to the Memorial,
the way the surface changes from grass ,in the quad,
to Bluestone.
We see that in the great circular block at the center
of the Memorial,
the way it incorporates the names of the 142 Amherst men
who died in those wars.
They're arranged in 13 concentric circles
evoking the 13 states,
there are 48 stars around the edge of the Memorial
suggesting the 48 states of the union
at the time of the second world war,
the blocks at the edges of the Memorial precinct
name the theaters of war in the first and second world wars,
the obelisks and the blocks are blunt
to suggest lives cut short.
And yet there are suggestions of life everlasting
in the flowers around the Memorial
that blossom in the springtime.
They reduces classical architecture to its essence.
And it has a kind of severity that's perfectly in tune
with the original architecture of Amherst College.
There are a lot of things that the college has achieved,
and there are a lot of things
that the college still can achieve.
The key really is to retain and to be cognizant
of the architectural DNA of Amherst.
Elemental simplicity, beautiful materiality,
landscapes that provide gathering places
and linger in the memory, but bringing that DNA,
that boldness to bear on the latest academic challenges,
cultural challenges, technological imperatives.
And when you do that, you create something very powerful.
(soft music)