a question of imagination and taste - objects

Some furniture was included in the 1950s plans for Jewett. This bench is original to the building and was designed specially for it. Edge piping reinforces the clean squared-off profile of the piece. The black Naugahyde cover gives the bench cushion its particular sheen. 

Naugahyde is a synthetic PVC-based material meant to offer a more affordable and versatile alternative to natural leather. It was used in a lot of midcentury upholstery, including furniture intended for public spaces and car interiors. It is waterproof, relatively easy to clean, comes in a wide variety of colors, and is available in much larger bolts than natural leather, making it possible to seamlessly cover large surfaces that might otherwise be prohibitively expensive to upholster with leather. It is still manufactured today, although it probably peaked in popularity around the 1950s-70s, when many designers and clients were exploring the futuristic-seeming possibilities offered by vinyls, acrylics, and other plastics. 

Naugahyde was specified for multiple pieces of Jewett furniture, probably just because it was more stain-resistant than fabric and more economical than leather. But it was also very on trend for a modernist building and represented some of the design world's excitement about new high-tech materials. Paul Rudolph would become a major proponent of 'new materials' in architecture; see his use of formed-in-place and molded concrete for surface textures and built-in furniture on the UMass Dartmouth campus, or his use of transparency and plastics in the late 1980s Modulightor building. 

Herman Miller DSX-1, tubular steel frame, brown Naugahyde over fiberglass, nylon foot glides, late 1950s

The DSX-1 chairs were designed by Charles and Ray Eames for Herman Miller. This model, with a fiberglass body, nylon foot glides, H-shaped base, and Naugahyde covering, was manufactured in the late 1950s. These chairs were ordered as part of the original Jewett building project and have been in use throughout the building since it opened. They are in varying states of repair today. The seat covers are ripped on some chairs, and various types of repairs, both professional and amateur, have been attempted throughtout the years. The nylon foot glides were meant to be more adjustable than the metal feet on earlier models of this chair, but they become brittle over time. The chairs in the gallery for this exhibition do have all their feet, but that makes them a rarity: most of the Eames chairs you will see around Jewett are lacking some or all of their feet.

Saarinen desk chair for Knoll 72 PBC-6, collection of the Wellesley Art Dept, plastic back, brushed chrome legs, brown Naugahyde seat, late 1950s

The model 72 executive chairs were designed by Eero Saarinen for Knoll in the 1950s. This chair came in a variety of options, including versions with molded arms and versions with padded backs. The armless, plastic-backed design chosen for Jewett was supposed to be as hardy and versatile as it was stylish. Unlike the Eames chairs, most of the Saarinens still in use around the building have all their feet - their metal foot glides held up much better over the years.

Saarinen was one of the architects that the Art Department considered for the Jewett building project. Although the job ultimately went to Paul Rudolph, Saarinen was obviously responsible for some iconic midcentury designs, and the inclusion of his chairs in the building was very much in keeping with its overall aesthetic.

Jewett furniture lists, Wellesley College Archives, 1958

Two examples of documents listing proposed chair models and their intended number and destination. You can see some of the Knoll and Herman Miller models described above listed here. The department also planned to reuse furniture from Farnsworth that was still in good shape, but asked that it be refinished first.

Jewett parquet flooring, collection of the Wellesley Art Department, wood, ca. 1958

Some other parts of the building have a light-colored terrazzo flooring. Terrazzo is a composite flooring material that, like mosaic, involves small chips of glass, marble, granite, or other stone set in a cement or resin-like matrix. Unlike mosaic, terrazzo patterns are randomized; designs or patterns in terrazzo typically come from the juxtaposition of larger differently colored areas of material, not from the careful arrangement of the chips in matrix.

The Jewett main hallway foyer entrance floor, the Jewett Sculpture Court floor, and some stairs on both sides of the building are made of terrazzo. While some, like the Sculpture Court, are original, others, like the main hallway entrance area, were later additions replacing sections of damaged original flooring.

Although no longer used in the main gallery space, there are still two exhibition areas in Jewett with fabric wall coverings. The Jewett Hallway Galleries are covered with tall panels of gray-tan woven fabric, pictured at left. This wall treatment has been in place since the 1977 renovation, although the fabric has been replaced a few times since then (most recently in Summer 2018). The Jewett Sculpture Court also has two walls in its lower level that are covered in a stiffer and warmer-toned fabric, pictured at right. This fabric has not been replaced as recently as the Hallway Gallery fabric, and does have some visible damage as a result of people using inappropriate exhibition hardware on it over the years.

These columns are examples of the 3 Greek architectural orders alongside the 4-lobed column that Paul Rudolph designed for Jewett. Even the simplest Greek column is more elaborate than the columns you see in this building. But modernism generally rejected all ornament in favor of purely functional forms, so it is notable that Rudolph's 'cloverleaf' columns do still retain a much-abstracted nod to the fluting of a Greek column. 

The Jewett columns are all made of concrete aggregate; from a distance they look pale gray or tan, while up close a complex texture emerges. 

Jewett brise soleil model, Zoe Mitchell '23, laser-cut wood and acrylic paint, 2025

This model shows the general structure of the Jewett brise soleil. The ideal angle of the slats for sun abatement was a matter of debate. The department was concerned that any screen on the building might create prominent light/shadow patterns inside. Intense patterns on walls and floors would potentially be disruptive both to artwork installed in museum spaces and to classes; for example, studio art classes that were attempting to work on vertical easels might have such patterns cast onto them, which would be visually distracting for both students and instructors. The department also wanted people to be able to look out through the screen without having their views completely obstructed by it. 

These two letters between Robert Schneider (business manager of the College) and Agnes Abbot (Art Dept chair) express some of the department's concerns with the brise soleil and how the College attempted to find solutions. Mr. Kreinheder was John Kreinheder, Wellesley's Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds. Mr. Johnson was David Johnson, the Jewett construction job captain with Anderson, Beckwith & Haible (the local architecture firm working with Paul Rudolph on the Jewett project). 

There was a balancing act here: the amount of sun passing through the screen could be limited by extending the length of the slats, but doing so would reduce the view (Schneider says: "...as though looking through a tube"). 

The concern about disruptive light and shadow was greatest in the winter, when the angle of the sun at Wellesley's latitude can create very long shadows. Anderson, Beckwith & Haible determined that by extending the brise soleil slats an extra 5/8", they might lessen the impact of shadows without completely compromising the view. A chart prepared by David Johnson to show what angles of sunlight could still get through at various times of day and on various dates is below.

Note that all this correspondence was taking place in June 1958. The building officially opened in October 1958. Adjustments like these meant that work would need to continue for some time after the opening, including the actual installation of the brise soleil screens. In the October 23, 1958 edition of The Wellesley News, which was reporting on opening ceremonies for the Jewett Arts Center, Rudolph says, "I feel desperate that the screens have not arrived yet, because they will make such a difference."

At certain times of day and certain times of year sunlight shining through the brise soleil does create very intense patterns. Despite all the adjustments, this seems to have been an unavoidable consequence of designing a screen open enough to permit a view. But now that the building is no longer the College's museum, and easel-based studio art courses have largely moved into Pendleton West, it is less of an operational issue. Light-blocking shades in all classrooms allow spaces to be darkened as needed for projection. And the patterns created by the screens provide a dynamic, ever-shifting interplay of light and shadow that activates various spaces in the upper levels of Jewett throughout the year.

This 'Slide King' lantern slide projector by Beseler was intended for use in larger classrooms or the Auditorium. Although the bellows allowed for some adjustment, the focal length of its lens would have prevented it from being used in a smaller space where it could not be positioned at a sufficient distance away from the screen.

The Charles Beseler Company is an American industrial company that today mostly manufactures packaging machinery and photographic equipment. Their German founder started out selling 19th century projection devices like magic lanterns. The company moved to the US in the early 20th century and began to manufacture darkroom photographic equipment in addition to projectors. They are one of the few remaining manufacturers of darkroom photo enlargers today.

Lantern slides are printed on glass and are much larger than the 35mm plastic slides that became popular around midcentury. You can see a few examples scattered around the projector in this photo.

Even though 35mm slides were becoming very common around the time Jewett was being built, the Art Department continued to use lantern slides for a long time. Partly this was because the department had a large collection of them, and it made sense to continue using a resource that was already on-hand. Partly this was because lantern slides, when used properly, can produce very high resolution images, so the quality of the projection did not suffer even if the department was using older machines.

You can see a slide loaded into the holder on the side of the machine. Each slide had to be hand-loaded, and this particular projector could only hold one slide at a time. The furniture that was designed for these machines had to position them high enough to project onto the screen, but low enough that they could be easily accessed and operated by faculty, staff, or students.

This rack was custom-designed as part of the building project in order to hold study photos. The wood and finish match cabinetry and doors throughout Jewett. 

When studying art history or architecture, it is important to see the artworks and buildings under discussion. Students would see projected slide images in classes, and had access to many art books in the Art Library. But students did not usually have access to the slide projectors outside of class time, and when an entire class needed to study a large number of images, the competition for books could be fierce. Images in books could also only be viewed page by page. In the years before desktop computing these printed photographs, mounted on boards, were the best way for students to study large numbers of photos on their own outside of class time. Study photos also allowed students to rearrange images freely so that they could be viewed in chronological order, grouped by subject or technique, or in some other kind of relationship with each other depending on what was being studied.

The study photo pictured above is the W.R. Healy House in Sarasota, Florida, by Paul Rudolph and Ralph Twitchell. 

The rack is filled with other study photos featuring modernist architecture, which exhibition visitors were invited to examine. The Art Department's collection of study photos was not only for architecture, of course.

This t-shirt belongs to Kathryn O'Rourke '02, current director of the Architecture program at Wellesley and a former Art Dept Slide Library student worker. As someone who has been both a student tasked with making and managing slides and a professor teaching from these images, she has a unique perspective on the importance of slides to the Wellesley Art Department:

"I tend to think that Art History as a discipline was shaped at least in part by the experience of organizing and delivering lectures using slides. Slide libraries were departmental centers of sorts - places where faculty ran into each other regularly and chatted informally. Work study students crossed paths with faculty and staff and, if they were paying attention, got a behind-the-scenes peek at one of Wellesley's most important departments and ground zero for undergraduate education in art history nationally. Needless to say, the shift to digital images swept much of this away and, I think, contributed to major changes in departmental culture."

The July 1959 issue of Architectural Forum contained a review of the new Jewett Arts Center and early photographs, some of which, like this photo by Lionel Freedman, are also in the collection of the Wellesley College Image Archives. This issue also contained a critique of the building by James Marston Fitch, an architect and preservationist. The original publication was framed in the exhibition, but a replica was available next to it for gallery visitors to handle and read.

As a significant early building from an important architect, the Jewett Arts Center has been the focus of much scholarly interest. These posters are from two relatively recent events featuring the building.

The November 2012 Harry Halverson Lecture on American Architecture was given by Timothy M. Rohan, then Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The talk was titled 'Paul Rudolph's "Adolescent Architecture": American Modernism in the 1950s'.

The October 2016 symposium 'The Jewett Arts Center: The Modern Campus at Mid-Century & Today' featured two days of presentations about the Jewett Arts Center, modernism, and American campus architecture.

In 2015 the Jewett Arts Center received a 'Keeping it Modern' grant from the Getty Foundation. Intended to support "some of the finest examples of modern architecture in the world," the grant funded the creation of a conservation plan aimed at "sustain[ing] Rudolph's vision while accommodating the program needs and environmental demands of a 21st-century arts center."

Ahana Basu's photography-centered thesis project looked at the Jewett Arts Center and Pendleton West as examples of architecture that hold memory through the way they are altered and marked by those who inhabit them. Ahana posited that Jewett and PNW, as art buildings, operate and visually encode history differently from other spaces on the Wellesley College campus.

To see some of the contents of this book, and to see how Ahana's project was installed in the 2025 Thesis & Senior Exhibition, click here.

As the building's 70th anniversary approaches some new issues are making themselves known, and some longstanding issues are becoming more pressing. Although upgrades were made to the building's HVAC systems in the 70s and 90s renovations, much of this equipment is now quite old, and issues with heating, cooling, and humidity are present in various spaces - although it may be worth noting that the Art and Music Departments were unhappy with temperature and moisture control in the building pretty much from the start. See the below letter from Agnes Abbot:

Note that this letter is dated June 1959, only 8 months or so after the building opened. Temperature and moisture control are especially urgent issues for the storage of artwork and musical instruments, so Jewett's resident academic departments were (and remain) particularly attuned to problems with excessive heat, cold, and humidity.

The other major issue is accessibility. Rudolph, as is obvious to anyone who has visited any of his larger buildings, loved to include as many stairs as possible in his designs, and Jewett is no exception. While these stairs add drama and visual interest both inside and out, they do mean that some parts of the building are not easily (or at all) accessible for people who cannot use stairs. There is a ramp on the south side of the building, and the 2017 renovation and re-landscaping of Pendleton West added several fully accessible entrance possibilities from the north. But spaces like the upper level of the Auditorium and the main level of the Sculpture Court are not currently served by ramps or elevators. These spaces may be beautiful, and they were in compliance with building code when Jewett was constructed, but bringing the building up to date with current accessibility guidelines and codes will be a crucial aspect of any major future renovations.

As the College begins to plan for Jewett's next big renovation, these structural considerations will need to inform the work, along with a review of current pedagogical needs and planning for the courses and creative technologies of the foreseeable future. But the architectural significance of Paul Rudolph's design is also an important factor. Understanding the Jewett Arts Center's place in the history of architecture and its impact on the teaching of creative practice at Wellesley is critical to our ability to safeguard its key features for the benefit of generations of Wellesley students yet to come.