Founded in 1870 in a leafy suburb 12 miles west of Boston, Wellesley College, a liberal arts institution for women, has a student body of just 2,350. Intimate though it is, its alumnae roster, which includes Madeleine Albright and Hillary Rodham Clinton, is sometimes referred to as “the most powerful women’s network in the world.” So it is fitting that a modern addition on the historic Academic Quad here, by KieranTimberlake, is diminutive but has a quiet power and a complex agenda.
The campus, with a 1921 master plan by Frederick Law Olmsted (and another by Michael Van Valkenburgh in 1998), is something to behold. Five hundred acres of rolling hills and vales, wetland meadows, and woodlands are traversed by rambling paths and offer views out across Lake Waban. At the campus’s heart, Norumbega Hill, is the Academic Quad, ringed by buildings at its periphery, including Pendleton Hall. Designed by Charles Klauder in 1934 for the physics and chemistry departments, the western half of the collegiate Gothic building was later turned over to house the arts, which, for 30-odd years, occupied the lab building in an ad hoc manner.
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