Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, has one of the few consistently picturesque New England campuses where brick-and-stone 19th-and-20th-century Federal, Classical Revival, and Gothic Revival structures are clustered around a large, tree-lined quad. You can walk from one end of the campus to the other without getting depressed by aggressively substandard Modern architecture built after World War II — as is too frequently the case elsewhere. Only one oversize eyesore (a tower) sits at the edge of the campus, but removed enough not to destroy the gestalt.
Considering what the small, 1,700-student college has at stake, it is not surprising Bowdoin trustees get a bit apprehensive if an architect says something like, “I see an all-glass building here.” As Timothy Mansfield, AIA, a partner at Cambridge Seven, puts it, “They immediately think of a commercial office building on a highway.”
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