Architecture always speaks a message, and what this campus tells us is that there’s no master planner, no dominating tradition. You’re on your own.
How do you put a new building into a setting like that? Do you just invent another new shape?
Not in the case of the Mandel Center for the Humanities, the latest addition to the Brandeis campus. It’s fascinating to see how this new building deals with the DNA of this quirky place. Whatever it does, it does with a reason. Nothing is arbitrary. It derives an architectural logic from the way it relates to its site, to its neighbors, and to the program of activities it houses within its walls. Once you understand it, the building feels inevitable.
Mandel was designed by the architect Michael McKinnell of Kallmann McKinnell & Wood, the Boston firm that long ago gave us Boston City Hall. The principal donor was the Mandel Philanthropic Foundation of Cleveland. Construction cost was a frugal $20 million.
For starters, Mandel is a building with an interesting purpose. The study of humanities is out of fashion today. I’ve seen predictions that 80 percent of the jobs of the future will require math or physics. College students majoring in the humanities have shrunk by more than half since 1970. TV comics joke about English majors as the nation’s future waiters.
Mandel takes the opposite view. It celebrates the humanities. It’s a mixing bowl, bringing scholars from every branch of that field to meet and mix with one another. To house them, Mandel provides an array of spaces, including a 90-seat lecture hall, classrooms and seminar rooms, social areas, and offices. As much as possible, all the spaces open out to one another to foster social contact.
Another purpose of Mandel is to proclaim, visually, the presence of the humanities in the university. The building is sited at the highest point of hilly Brandeis, in an area that in the past was regarded as somewhat remote from the campus center. Mandel’s boldest feature is a four-story glass front wall, hoisted like a sail or a banner above the university. We’re here, says the architecture. Mandel’s lecture hall, sheathed in gray slate, thrusts forward from the rest of the building like a handshake.
