You are here

Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center

-A A +A
2005, Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects; Michael Van Valkenburgh and Associates, Alumnae Valley landscaping. Wellesley College.

The Wang Center presents a notably congenial adaptation of the architects' characteristic deconstructivist idiom to the dominant aesthetic tradition of the Wellesley campus. Besides proclaiming the lively diversity of the center's extracurricular functions, its exuberant assemblage of angled volumes jutting in and out answers to the picturesque contours of nearby revivalist buildings. Similarly, the dark colors and emphatic textures of its slate shingle and copper cladding blend into the dense landscaping of the site. Designed in tandem with the building, adjacent Alumnae Valley—the substantial landscape extending south to Lake Waban—is an imaginative restoration of drumlin, meadow, and wetland topography that for most of the college's history was flattened and paved for parking and various service and maintenance facilities.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Keith N. Morgan
×

Data

What's Nearby

Citation

Keith N. Morgan, "Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center", [Wellesley, Massachusetts], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/MA-01-WL11.2.

Print Source

Cover: Buildings of Massachusetts

Buildings of Massachusetts: Metropolitan Boston, Keith N. Morgan, with Richard M. Candee, Naomi Miller, Roger G. Reed, and contributors. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009, 518-518.

If SAH Archipedia has been useful to you, please consider supporting it.

SAH Archipedia tells the story of the United States through its buildings, landscapes, and cities. This freely available resource empowers the public with authoritative knowledge that deepens their understanding and appreciation of the built environment. But the Society of Architectural Historians, which created SAH Archipedia with University of Virginia Press, needs your support to maintain the high-caliber research, writing, photography, cartography, editing, design, and programming that make SAH Archipedia a trusted online resource available to all who value the history of place, heritage tourism, and learning.

,