a question of imagination and taste - archival photos, blueprints, drawings, and letters

Top row, left to right:

• Agnes Abbot, Chair of the Art Department during the Jewett project. She was an artist mostly known for her watercolor paintings.

• John McAndrew, Director of the Wellesley Art Museum during the Jewett project. He worked at Vassar and MoMA before he came to Wellesley.

• Margaret Clapp '30, President of Wellesley College during the Jewett project. She was a history professor and writer of a biography that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948.

Bottom row, left to right:

• Paul Rudolph, Architect. He would go on to be known primarily for his concrete buildings, most famously the Yale Art & Architecture Building (now known as Rudolph Hall).

• Mary Cooper Jewett '23, donor, Wellesley alumna, and College Trustee. The Art wing is named after her; the Music wing is named after her mother-in-law, Margaret Weyerhaeuser Jewett.

• George Frederick Jewett: donor, husband of Mary Cooper Jewett. His mother, wife, and daughter all went to Wellesley.

Many people were involved in the Jewett building project, but a few people, pictured above, are named frequently in documents relating to the planning stages. The Art Department and Wellesley College were obviously heavily involved, giving input on what was needed in the new art building and keeping (or attempting to keep) Rudolph and later project managers on track and on budget. The donors were also involved. See this excerpt of a letter from Mary Cooper Jewett to Agnes Abbot, dated November 25, 1955:

"...My second question was concerning those everlasting skylights in the art building, a problem which seems to be troubling everybody including Mr. Rudolf [sic]. Now that Mr. Jewett and I have seen the drawing of the combined art and music building it is quite obvious why the art building has to have an uneven roof line to give the proper heigth. The sky lights in the last drawing please us much better than any of the previous ones but don't exactly satisfy us. Mr. Rudolf has been remarkably successful in ironing out earlier objections so that both he and Wellesley were satisfied, I trust that he will be equally successful now.

Mr. Jewett and I are very anxious and insistent that the art department be completely satisfied with the building and their share in it. If you have any observations which you would like to pass on to me I hope that you will do so. In the absence of any further problems we hope that we can make definite plans to go ahead with the building in early December."

The Jewetts, and especially Mary, were clearly active participants in the building process. They consulted with the architect and the department frequently, and had opinions about details as small as the design of the skylights. Their engagement with the project also meant that when opportunities arose to change the plan, they were willing and able to respond; Jewett was originally only an art building, and the expansion of the project to include facilities for the Music and Theater programs came later, with the full (logistic and financial) support of the donors.

Rudolph's design for Jewett emphasized opportunities for light (and people) to move freely around the building in perhaps unexpected ways. In the proposed Jewett Auditorium design, voids in the hallways to either side of the Auditorium allow light to pass from high windows all the way down to the first floor. The prominently visible brise soleil outside the window in the proposed classroom design shows Rudolph considering the ways this feature would be viewed not just from the outside, but from inside the building as well, where it impacted the way light came into the space. The Sculpture Court drawing indicates the dynamism that Rudolph felt a multi-level space could bring to a building.

Although Jewett was going to be the only modern building on the quad at the time, Rudolph understood it as a building in context. The building's site was carefully considered relative to the existing Norumbega Hill buildings so as to create a proper academic quad near the heart of campus. Green Hall's Galen Tower was already seen as an iconic element of the campus and a symbol of the College; Rudolph thought carefully about how the tower and Jewett might visually intersect, and how the tower was revealed as a visitor approached up the Jewett steps. Along the south side of the building, brick walls separating Jewett Road from Severance Green gradually stepped up and down to emphasize the slope of the landscape.

This relatively early drawing shows some elements of Jewett's design that lasted through to the final: the brise soleil, skylights, decorative stairs, rows of cloverleaf columns, the general 'large rectangular mass on narrower pedestal' shape of the south wing. But the design of the north wing, and the way the two wings connect, was quite different at this stage. The arrangement and number of skylights ultimately changed. And the angular 'prow' shape on the south wing was on the pedestal in this drawing. In the actual building, the prow is built into the upper mass on the west face, and both the upper mass and pedestal on the east face.

This prow feature was Rudolph's design, and was not necessarily something that the Art Department wanted, as you can see in this excerpt of an interview with Agnes Abbot, who was chair of the Art Department during the Jewett project:

MS. ABBOT: One change, which of course wasn't so awfully important but which we were kind of irritated about, was that after the acceptance of the plan, Rudolph decided to make an angle on the end of the building, which gave it the effect of a prow, so to speak... It really was an awful - I think it must architecturally have been quite a bother. But if you look at the building from the parking lot*, you see the prow [laughs].

...

MR. BROWN: And no structural or practical reason for it, was there?

MS. ABBOT: Well, except that he had established the idea of this angle in the ground plan - for instance, in the parking lot it shows up. But we didn't quite see why that was important. But anyhow, he felt that people were conscious of these things whether they were, you know, seen or not.

MR. BROWN: He thought it might be more interesting?

MS. ABBOT: Yes. I suppose so. Anyhow - 

Oral history interview with Agnes Abbot, 1981 August 25-1982 January 15. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Link to source.

[*ed note: Before the construction of the Davis Museum and Collins Cinema, there was a parking lot on the west side of the building, in what is now the Davis Plaza.]

These images show three unusual versions of the Jewett Arts Center brise soleil. The first image is the brise soleil field mockup during building construction. Field mockups are small sections of a building, usually part of the building envelope, constructed on site in the early phases of a building project. They allow architects, engineers, and construction workers to all see how various materials work in the actual climate where the building will be located - this is important because what seems great in the studio may not always work out so well in practice. A field mockup like this would have given some information about how the sun interacted with the screen at different times of day, and how the materials responded in windy conditions. Some faculty were concerned that the grilles would rattle distractingly in the wind, and a field mockup like this may have helped to ensure that they did not.

The second image is a photo showing the grilles removed from the brise soleil frame for cleaning in the '80s. You can see the windows and brick surfaces of the building covered with plastic so that they weren't damaged by sandblasting.

The third image is a presentation drawing. Rendered in black and white, it makes clear the way that the gridded pattern of the brise soleil has a close visual relationship with the brick below. While this relationship is present when viewing the actual building, the difference in color between the red brick and the white enameled brise soleil may make it harder to immediately apprehend in person.

In the days before personal computers, students studying art history mostly saw images of artworks and buildings either projected or printed. Slide projection worked well for classes, but outside of class time students did not always have access to a projector, the correct set of slides, and a projection screen. Of course books in the Art Library had many relevant images available, but the book format was limiting if an entire class needed to study large numbers of images at once. Study photos were cheaper to produce than entire books and more flexible than projection systems. The photos were typically printed and mounted on a neutral-colored card with a handwritten or typewritten caption. Long slim shelves in classrooms, as seen in the 3 photos above, provided places to organize large numbers of cards for maximum visibility. As with the slide projectors, study photo display systems were part of the original building design.

Custom casework like the storage racks depicted in these blueprints (and present in the exhibition - see an example on this page) were also built to house study photos when they were not in use on tables or shelves.

The Jewett Auditorium was originally home to both musical and theatrical performances. To facilitate quick scene changes, a set on a large platform could be dressed in the space that is now music classroom JAC 209. The platform rolled directly onto the stage through a pair of tall doors, riding on rails built into the stage surface. With the Theatre Studies program now based in Alumnae Hall, and the Music department prioritizing teaching space, JAC 209 was converted to a classroom. This system is not in use anymore, but the doors and rails are still present.

This large presentation drawing shows a fairly late but not quite final Jewett design. The south wing, on the left, looks similar to its current form, but the north wing and the central staircase are noticeably different. On the north wing, Rudolph explored the idea of much more transparency and a more complicated design for the upper level/roof. This design may have been abandoned for practical reasons, including cost. You can see that the imagined stair design at this stage was also much more complex than what was ultimately built. Patches of differently-colored paper, and evidence of opaque white erasure like along the top of the center roofline, give hints to Rudolph's process as he prepared the drawing.

Incident at Reunion 1968 and Car of one of Mr. Selluer's [?] Men, Wellesley College Image Archive SSID 12831681 and SSID 12831700, 1968

We don't know for sure that this was the precipitating incident, but these photos may show why bollards were added at the top of the Jewett stairs. According to the Wellesley College Archives this scene was from Commencement or Reunion 1968 (at Wellesley, Reunion is typically a week or so following Commencement), when someone mistook the stairs for a ramp and tried to drive down them. The car had to be winched off the stairs with chains.

All of Rudolph's realized buildings prior to the Jewett commission were located in Florida. He insisted on partnering with a local firm who knew more about building in New England. That firm was the Boston-based Anderson, Beckwith & Haible, who collaborated on this blueprint and on the Jewett project. The structural engineer also listed here, LeMessurier Associates, is another Boston-based firm that would develop a reputation for being particularly adept at concrete construction.

This blueprint shows the plan for the 2nd* (main) floor of the building, with the north wing at left and the south wing at right. The large open chevron-shaped space in the north wing is the Jewett Auditorium. The large open rectangle in the center of the building is the Jewett Art Gallery.

[*ed. note: On some early plans, the 2nd floor is shown with 3rd floor room numbers. Technically Jewett has 5 levels, but they are uneven. The north wing has a basement level, 1st floor, 2nd floor, and a minimally-accessible 3rd floor balcony in the Auditorium only. The south wing has a basement, 2nd floor, 3rd floor, and 4th floor.]

David R. Johnson was job captain on the 1958 Jewett construction when he worked for Anderson, Beckwith & Haible, and he was working for himself by the time Wellesley brought him in to run the 1970s Jewett renovation. Most of the 1977 structural changes happened on the 1st and 3rd floors, not the pictured main floor here. Critical main floor changes at this time included the introduction of glazing to the foyer doors, the installation of fabric panels in the Hallway Galleries, changes to the Gallery ceiling, and some changes to accommodate HVAC.

Jose Rafael Moneo designed the Davis Museum, and worked with Payette Assoc. on the related renovations to Jewett. The '90s work involved significant structural changes throughout the building as museum functions moved out and spaces were repurposed and restructured. The changes in the Gallery are the most obvious, but there are some other major differences between this plan and the earlier two, including new bridges to the Davis Museum and to Pendleton West.