Carl and Ruth Shapiro Campus Center, Brandeis University
Waltham, Mass.
Charles Rose Architects

Charles Rose placed a light-dappled atrium where four campus paths collide and wrapped it with a hive of activity

© Chuck Choi

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By Nancy Levinson

Brandeis University welcomed its first students in the fall of 1948, and since then the institution has been more or less under construction. In the past half-century, the wooded campus in Waltham, Massachusetts, has grown from a 90-acre site with a motley group of existing buildings—purchased from a defunct medical school—to more than a hundred structures on 235 acres.

Given the rapid pace of development, it’s not surprising that functional imperative at times ran ahead of planning logic. By the mid-1990s, it was apparent that the pastoral postwar campus of the early years had long since grown into what the school’s Web site describes as a “dense, more urban place.” The question of how to deal with that growth spurred a 1997 planning and design charrette. One of its key recommendations produced the Shapiro Campus Center, designed by Charles Rose Architects.

The new campus center would augment an existing student center to the north, and it would house diverse tenants: the university bookstore, an electronic library, a 250-seat theater, the school radio station, the school newspaper, administrative offices that oversee student life, assorted student organizations, a café, and exhibition space. And beyond its program, the new facility would need to answer to evolving campus lifestyles: It had to be open and available round-the-clock, and it had to provide what the school had long lacked, a vital center worthy of both the name and location.

For Rose, who has training and experience in landscape architecture, the opportunity to enhance cross-campus connections was compelling. So too was the chance to create outdoor spaces that would enliven and extend the interiors. To the south, these include ground-level and second-floor terraces and an expansive green lawn; and to the west, a quiet and shady courtyard defined by Shapiro and the adjacent Faculty Club.

The Faculty Club, designed by Harrison & Abramovitz, is Modernist. Before beginning Shapiro, Rose studied the campus carefully, noting the patterns and characteristics of its buildings and open spaces, and as a result he has made a strong, clear structure that neither mimics nor clashes with its context. In its forms and materials, Shapiro is by turns Minimalist and bold. The south facade, clad in limestone and pre-patinated copper, with windows of tinted glass, is gently inflected toward the large lawn. The sculptural north facade features large expanses of glass and copper.

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Formal name of Project:
Carl and Ruth Shapiro Campus Center, Brandeis University

Location:
Waltham, Mass.

Gross square footage:
65,000 sq. ft.

Owner:
Brandeis University

Owner's Representative:
Peter B. French, Executive Vice President

Architect:
Charles Rose Architects Inc.
115 Willow Ave
Somerville, MA 02144
www.charlesrosearchitects.com