NORTHAMPTON, Massachusetts. – Renovating a historic building is rarely simple, whether it’s a brownstone in Brooklyn or, in this case, the $ 120 million renovation of the century-old Neilson Library at Smith College. As any architect can attest, the emotionally attached owners of a venerable building can be far more challenging to manage than the construction itself. But any reservations that Maya Lin may have had after being hired in 2015 by Smith to redesign the 200,000-square-foot Neilson vanished as soon as she walked in the front door. Laughing, she recalled her reaction at the time: “This is going to be easy, because this is so bad!”
Three rounds of expansions prior to the original 1909 library structure – the campus centerpiece nestled within Berkshires and designed in 1893 by Frederick Law Olmsted, the chief architect of Manhattan’s Central Park – saw Neilson turn into a monstrosity . On a recent visit to the newly renovated library, Lin, 61, stopped in front of the front steps and pointed to where huge wings had been added on each side, effectively protecting the two halves of the school’s extensive lawns. It was even worse inside. “They put mezzanines two and a half meters high,” she said when we entered. “You went in and saw feet!”
The mezzanines are gone, as well as the view-blocking wings, replaced by two smaller expansions, set back and filled with windows, thus restoring Neilson’s 1909 façade to its original prominence. And Smith’s Special Collections, previously spread across different campus locations, have now all been moved to an air-conditioned area.
With the Neilson renovation completed and its doors set to reopen to students on March 29, this should have been a moment of professional triumph for Lin in a practice that mixes art and architecture, from the Museum of Chinese in America in downtown Manhattan to Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, back to its public debut in 1981 with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, whose aesthetic strength still draws thrilled crowds in Washington, DC
Even so, Lin was not in the mood for a victory lap. On January 25, her almost 25-year-old husband, Daniel Wolf, died of a sudden heart attack. The couple and their two daughters, India, 23, and Rachel, 21, were all together at their home in rural Colorado. “Nobody expected this,” said Lin. “It was just one of those things that literally came out of nowhere. And we are all like “- she lowered her voice to a stunned whisper -“what? “
Wolf was 65 years old, a quiet force – although profoundly influential – in the world of photography, starting as a dealer in the 70s, bringing together what is arguably the best photography collection in the world for the J. Paul Getty Museum and as a rightful collector himself, whose personal properties left curators in dismay. Ten of his 19th-century daguerreotypes were loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an exhibition that highlighted the urban landscapes of Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey – a symmetry that Lin said he particularly charmed her husband. He began his career in 1976, dragging a suitcase of photos onto the sidewalk in front of the Met and selling vintage prints to passersby.
Giraults are just a fraction of a now extensive collection that fills the former Yonkers City Jail, bought by Lin and Wolf and transformed into a private exhibition space and archive. A team is still busy cataloging and documenting all those photos – they could barely keep up, as Wolf continued to arrive with new acquisitions that he kept over the years in storage units in New York. A prison cell – with the bars still installed – is filled with nothing but prewar albums of personal photographs purchased decades ago in Paris’ flea markets; another contains gigantic plaques from the 19th century American West, taken by Carleton Watkins and William Henry Jackson.
“Every day he was like a kid in a candy store, he was digging up something he had forgotten,” said Lin. The organization of this work of art continues, as does Lin’s. With her “Ghost Forest”, an installation that dramatizes climate change, opening in New York City’s Madison Square Park in May, she said she decided to return to the Northeast and dive back into work. However, surely no one would envy you for a long period of private mourning?
“I spent three weeks with the kids without anything else,” she explained, thinking it would be therapeutic to stay busy. To facilitate the transition, her daughters traveled with her from Colorado to her home in New York; Rachel had driven with her to Smith that day. Not that Lin was having no doubts about this sudden re-immersion in public life. “It’s hard to be back,” she added with a slight tremor in her voice. “It is very difficult now.”
These are tough days for Smith College as well. The pandemic closed its campus and changed its online classes. Campus workers were dismissed and austerity measures were applied to faculty members. Although some students have moved back into the dormitories this spring, campus life beyond Zoom classes seems empty.
There also remain the painful reverberations of a 2018 campus incident involving the intersection of race and class, as reported by The New York Times last month. A student said she suffered a racial profile while eating in a closed dorm; an external investigation found no evidence of bias. But feelings and recriminations among teachers, students and staff remain raw. Consequently, Smith’s president, Kathleen McCartney, was thrilled to have the new Neilson Library as something the whole school could support. “I think the grand opening will just lift everyone’s spirits,” said McCartney.
Lin seemed equally excited to be visiting the library. She led the way to a terrace that offered stunning views of the surrounding mountains, pointing out significant details along the way. The large windows on the upper floor that were close to the treetops had been adorned with an ultraviolet web pattern – invisible to human eyes, but not to flying birds that could hit the transparent glass. Bird watchers also had a comfortable place to make their nests, with many of the window frames large enough to climb. “People are going to sleep here,” said Lin with a laugh, remembering her long days – and longest nights – studying at Yale, where, at the age of 21, she topped 1,420 competing proposals for the Veterans Memorial of the Vietnam. “I know why I was one of those people.”
More importantly, paper and ink books still cover the walls and occupy the cellar’s cellar. There may be an indoor café, common spaces and all the latest digital tools connected throughout the building, but these features coexist with quiet locations for lonely bags. In fact, the new Special Collections area offers 40,000 linear square feet of archival material. It includes the hand-corrected drafts of the Mortimer Rare Book Collection of Virginia Woolf novels and poems by Sylvia Plath, as well as the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History, which encompasses the personal roles of Emma Goldman activists to Gloria Steinem, along with the less prominent but equally vital figures, such as Joan E. Biren, who began indelibly photographing the private lives of lesbians in the 1970s.
“Although there are new ways to teach through the collections here, you are still in a book house,” Lin insisted. “Ultimately, a library has to be about reading. I don’t read on an iPad and I never will. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m a dinosaur. But I still feel the beauty of a book, I still believe in that beauty. “
Sitting for a moment in an empty meeting room, Lin was asked again why this Neilson project seemed so urgent, why she had left Colorado so soon. After all, her architect partner, William Bialosky, as well as the design firm Shepley Bulfinch she was collaborating with, could certainly oversee any final adjustments.
“I owe Smith my existence,” she replied bluntly. “I owe them everything.”
She told the story of her mother, Julia Lin, who was attending college in Shanghai in May 1949, while Mao Zedong’s communist army besieged the city. On the day that Mao’s forces marched to Shanghai, Julia received a scholarship to transfer to Smith in the fall – if she could get there. That August, with two $ 10 bills and her letter of acceptance sewn into a collar, her father smuggled her out of the country on a fishing boat, even with bombs falling on their heads and pirates crossing the harbor to stealing fugitives. It took her a month before she finally managed to cross the lines of the Nationalist Army, sail south to Hong Kong and finally get here in Northampton. But once on campus, Lin said, his mother prospered, graduating in 1951 and then earning a doctorate. in Chinese language and literature at the University of Washington. There she met and married a refugee Chinese student. Both became professors at Ohio University.
“If she hadn’t gotten that scholarship to study at Smith, she wouldn’t have left China,” continued Lin, “which meant she wouldn’t have met my father. Poof! In an instant, I don’t exist. ”She remembers having accompanied her mother to an alumni meeting in Smith in 1993, where she herself received an honorary doctorate. “She was just beaming. My mom passed away in 2013, and I really wish she was alive to see that now. “
She stopped and added: “You can rarely take this home in architecture, when a project and a client are so connected to their life story”. As Lin walked away, she held out her arm with an open palm; her daughter Rachel perfectly slid her own hand into her mother’s, all without missing a beat.