Athens, Ga. – A red-gold shower of welder’s sparks
crackles and hisses. There’s a persistent groan and squeak from heavy
equipment, and down one hall an electric power hammer slams nails with a
percussive wham.
Welcome to the new Lamar Dodd School of Art, which has leapt
from a parking lot on UGA’s East Campus into being after less than a year of
day and night construction. It has a long way to go yet—mounds of red clay and
swales of sticky mud surround the site, and a visitor can only imagine the
final look.
When students and faculty move in a year from now, however,
the $40 million structure will be the crowning touch of an area where art and
music will thrive.
“It’s phenomenal,” says Georgia Strange, director of the art
school, as she pauses, hard hat firmly in place, outside a studio-to-be in the
busy work site. “It’s very rare for a university to commit these kinds of
resources to art and very heartening. It’s a perfect example why people in arts
or who support and appreciate the arts choose to live and work in Athens,
Georgia, and not in New York, Los Angeles or Chicago.”
UGA project manager Linda Henneman, from the office of University
Architects, leads a small tour group, describing with pride how now-empty
spaces will be turned into auditoriums, classrooms, studios and offices.
Indeed, the 208,000-square-foot building will dramatically change East Campus
and give students in the busy art school some of the best facilities in the
country.
The new structure was conceived as two buildings joined by a transparent two-story lobby atrium bisected
by the building’s central stair. Some 172,000 square feet will be used
for teaching and artwork, with the rest housing an elaborate heating/cooling
and ventilation system.
In addition to studio
classrooms, graduate studios and faculty studio/offices, there is space in the
new building for 10 of the 14 areas of concentration in the art school, as well
as administrative offices. These include fabric design, printmaking, photography,
graphic design, drawing and painting, scientific illustration, art education, digital
media, foundations and art history.There will be two general-purpose
lecture auditoriums with 100 and 200 seats respectively, and both will have the
latest audiovisual classroom technology.Three other general-purpose
classrooms are included, two for 32 students and one for 70 students. Ceramics,
sculpture, jewelry-making and interior design will remain in other venues on
campus.
An open courtyard space
between the two wings of the building shows one interesting feature: the wings
aren’t quite parallel.
“The constraints of the
site, with the Hugh Hodgson School of Music to the north and a stream to the
south, dictated a nonparallel building plan that tapers to the east, creating a
trapezoidal courtyard just beyond and visible through the lobby,” explains
Henneman.
Sustainable features
also grace the new structure and include exterior solar shading to reduce heat
gain and interior light shelves to optimize natural light by reflecting
sunlight onto ceilings. Because of the sophisticated exhaust ventilation system
necessary for art studios, energy recovery units, which conserve energy in
conditioning air, also have been included. The surrounding site includes a
storm-water infiltration system, and additionally there will be a “green” roof
over the large lecture hall.
A new parking deck is
also under consideration for an area not far away, says Henneman, though a
final decision on it has not been made yet.
Above all, what
visitors see inside the rising structure is light. The building’s huge window
spaces will allow natural light to flood studios, offering artists what they
have for centuries considered a necessity.
While the new building
will replace the LDSOA’s aging North Campus quarters, the school itself has
been burgeoning for decades and is one of the largest units in the Franklin
College of Arts and Sciences. The current home of the Lamar Dodd School
of Art was built in 1963 to accommodate 350 art majors. It continues to attract top students in all areas of art from Georgia
and around the country, as it has for many years.
Founded in 1930, the
school was led for many years by Lamar Dodd, a renowned artist whose name is
now part of it. With more than a thousand undergraduate majors, the Lamar Dodd
School of Art has grown with its reputation. In addition to its
on-campus facilities, the school also has a year-round Studies Abroad Program
in Cortona, Italy, that has served more than
4,000 students from 400 American institutions since its inception in 1969. More
recently the school has expanded the international opportunities for study in
art to include programs in Japan,
Cuba and Ghana.
Meanwhile, construction continues apace at the new site, and
next fall, the first generation of UGA art students will arrive to a dream
fulfilled.
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