Bar Harbor is the busiest venue on Maine’s idyllic Mount Desert Island, known for its 31,000-acre Acadia National Park and for the island’s history as a summer colony for the Rockefellers, Astors, and Vanderbilts. While the village of Bar Harbor teems in the summer with tourists crowding T-shirt shops and ice cream parlors, calmer enclaves exist outside the village, such as the 38-acre College of the Atlantic (COA) on Frenchman Bay. For this small private undergraduate institution, Susan T. Rodriguez | Architecture • Design of New York collaborated with OPAL Architecture of Belfast, Maine, to create a crisply tailored, sustainable, 28,000-square-foot, two-story classroom building. The polished result, dedicated in September, meets remarkably high standards of sustainability with a design distinction often missing in energy-efficient efforts.
Founded in 1969, the college’s mission, shaped by the era’s counter-cultural values and growing ecological concerns, led to the creation of an interdisciplinary program focusing on the environment and on community service. All students graduate with a B.A. in Human Ecology (except for a few pursuing master’s degrees). Says COA’s president, Darron Collins (class of ’92), “We were a small, scrappy institution, but we have grown over time in size and recognition.”
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