An offer to provide a brief history of a newly renovated building on campus provided the perfect invitation to do a little visual comparisons.  The newly renovated building started life as a post office and now houses IT staff.

Students traditionally filed over at 11am to pick up their mail.  The 1958 post office boasted air conditioning – with a unit visible in the upper left.   To get in all the boxes for students and towns people, narrow halls were necessary.

No narrow halls now. Instead the floor plan offers flexible spaces, brighter colors and we hope better air conditioning.  Coming back, it made sense to check out changes in the library.

Opened in 1974, the library featured display cases and shelves of books and magazines as well as study tables.

In 2017, the library still has magazines but they share space with dvds. There are fewer book shelves and more computers.

Students could chose between a balcony overlook or getting closer to the windows.  President’s portraits overlooked the students.

Newer furniture — some of it on wheels. White boards and new art on the walls compete with the views and computer cords drape across it all.

The view out this window has changed with the new Wall Academic Center.

Instead of a spread of dogwood trees and a circle of benches, students now have an urban-vibe terrace between the wings of the Wall Center.

The view from the front of the library changed as well. Richardson plaza has art while the landscaping by large planters has given way to open spaces.

The new building has special features including a “green” wall with living plants but in some ways, even with new technology, science labs look like science labs.

The new building did have a major change reflecting student choices. Students aren’t drinking well water these days but they are carrying a variety of water bottles everywhere.

Finally, what about leisure time? — Couches are still popular and TV’s got bigger

–But table tennis and foosball are still nearby.

Davidson College has often appeared on the cover of publications, particularly local or state magazines. This week, let’s take a look at the covers that made it into our collections:

 

Each new academic year brings new faces to campus.  This fall brought a new classroom building, the E. Craig Wall Academic Center. Faculty, staff and students are getting used to new classrooms, labs and offices.  What once was plans on paper and computer screens is now a 3-dimensional space reshaping the look of the campus.

Not all building proposals have come into being as originally designed.  Beginning with the original Chambers building, initial ideas shifted -altered by budgets and continued conversations about the best use of spaces.

In the case of Chambers, the building constructed was about 1/8 of the planned structure.  The vision included a grand quad with spaces for Laundry Court and a Steward’s Court linked by a garden.

With the completion of the Wall Academic Center, work has begun on Martin Chemical building. Like Chambers, the current Martin is the second iteration of the building.  Plans for the first Martin Chemical Laboratory were published in the class of 1899’s yearbook Narrative of the Nines (note: This only yearbook not to use the title Quips and Cranks. It only contains information about the senior class. )

The building constructed in 1901 looked a little different.

The plans for Johnston Gymnasium underwent similar smaller changes. The college produced a 16-page fund-raising booklet for the “New Gymnasium” focusing on the inadequacies of the existing gym facilities and the failure of 19 recent graduates to pass the the Marine Corps physical test. The building design was featured on a page that quoted an 28 March 1942 Atlanta Journal editorial under a headline “Davidson Will Be Next:”

Vanderbilt is following the lead of Harvard, Yale and other great Eastern universities in prescribing a mandatory course of physical training for the student body. Beginning Monday every matriculate, unless crippled or the victim of an organic weakness, must participate in calisthenics or competitive action. The program is similar to that which Harvard has worked out and will start on April 6.

This sketch was described as a tentative suggestion

Revised plans c1948

Johnston Gym as built.

Very different designs were on the table as the college looked to build a new library in the 1970s. The general footprint remained the same as architects played with arches and columns.

In the 1990s, the fund-raising prospectus for a new visual arts building imagined as a more of a complex.

The final version incorporated elements into one space.

Some plans, such as a garden near the Carolina Inn have never made it from sketches to revisions to construction so we can only imagine how they might look.

The view from the library looks different these days. Construction is well underway on the new wings for the Martin Chemical Laboratory.

Chemistry has a long history at Davidson with the first Martin building opening in 1901. Known as the Martin Chemical Laboratory, it was named in honor of William Joseph Martin, Sr. chemistry professor (1869-1896) and acting Davidson College President (1887-1888).

That the building lasted 40 years, is a testament to the ingenuity of faculty.  In the first decades of the 20th century, three labs, one stockroom and a 120 seat lecture hall were deemed ample resources.

By 1941, the building was outdated and the college began construction of a more modern replacement.  The new Martin Science Building was 3 stories to the original’s two stories and greatly expanded the number of classrooms and laboratories but stayed with one lecture hall. There was one additional change – this time the building’s name referred to both William Joseph Martin, Sr.  and William Joseph Martin, Jr.

For almost 2 decades, the building housed chemistry and biology. In 1960, the Biology Department moved into the new Dana Science building.

By the 1970s, the state of the art conditions of the 1940s were far from sufficient.  Department chair, Nick Burnett described the conditions in an August 1978 Davidson Update article, “It has been difficult teaching in rooms with inadequate lighting, noisy radiators, poor acoustics, and no air conditioning.”

Renovations in 1979 upgraded the facilities including a new lecture room featuring hexagonal lights and mahogany walls. New fluorescent lights along with orange and chrome fume hoods brightened the lab spaces. The renovations also brought the return of the name Martin Chemical Laboratory when the building was rededicated in 1980.

Fast forward another 15 years or so and the $1,000,000 renovation in 1980 was being updated with a $400,000 National Science Foundation Infrastructure grant.  The grant provided for updating the current labs and building new faculty research labs.

Fast forward again, to 2014 and more renovations and the reintegration of other sciences into the two wings being added to the original building.

Even though it will be another year or two before the next dedication invitations are sent and the archives will add to yet another program to the ones from the  1944 and 1980 ceremonies, the Martin legacy will carry on in good Davidson tradition.