Today RISD is celebrating the opening of a new building. This is the Chace Center. Diversity? Chase is a kind of dump-in-everything building, with a zillion different functions. And it stands in the middle of another kind of diversity, a crowd of older RISD buildings of many eras. RISD doesn't really have a campus; what it has is a steep hillside crowded with architecture.
Chace's designer is the noted Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo. Moneo practices out of Madrid but still teaches at Harvard, where he once chaired the department of architecture. In 1996, he won the Pritzker Prize, architecture's equivalent of a Nobel. He's also the architect of the Davis Museum at Wellesley.
By hiring so notable an architect, RISD swung for the fences. It's a gamble they've won. Chace is as good as it is unpretentious.
Moneo sees RISD's architectural diversity as a metaphor for human diversity. "RISD's architecture represents the school as a rich collection of individual activities," he says. For a new building to fit in, therefore, it has to be different.
Some buildings are meant to be looked at and others are intended to work for the people who will use them. Chace falls into the second category. But that's not to say it isn't handsome. With its facades of crisp glass, aluminum trim, and smooth red brick, it adds a new note of unabashed modernism to the pleasing architectural cacophony that is RISD.
Chace's industrial-looking glass-and-brick appearance reminds me of an icon of late modernism, the Leicester University engineering building in England by the late James Stirling. Chace is subtler than it looks: the glass wall is a sandwich, made up of two layers of glass, the outer one etched so as to be translucent and the inner one mirror-surfaced. The wall glows softly when illuminated at night.
