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Although modest in scale at 45,000 sq.ft., this building is one of Kallmann McKinnell & Wood's most important projects. The requirements called for a new headquarters of the Academy in a residential neighborhood, which would reflect in its architecture a long tradition as much as a commitment to the present and the future. The building was to provide a comfortable home for the formal and informal meetings of its members.

Spaces for gatherings as well as for private encounters were arranged at the ground floor, and workplaces for administration and the production of the Academy's publication "Daedalus" were placed at the second floor level.
Spaces for meetings and the exchange of ideas were designed as clusters of aggregated chambers, each distinctive from the others, and rotated around a central atrium, while affording differing views of the surrounding park landscape framed by the protective layer of the arcade.

The free-flowing space of the atrium and the deliberately labyrinthine spatial sequence of rooms are impaled on a pervasive procession of interior and exterior columns, a compositional device which serves as an architectural metaphor for the dialogue between Neo-Platonism and modern attitudes. A particular classical allusion is the insertion of the amphitheatre form into the underlying orthogonal matrix of the plan.

Images of ancient academies, of classical villas and country houses, of Wright and the Greene Brothers, of Arts and Crafts motives and the cool abstractions of modernism are all invoked in the complexities of the design. At its exterior, the pyramidal volume and multiple roof form is composed of a dominant lower floor with its stately columns, and an upper floor of deliberately rustic construction. Thus the image of a temple-villa is merged with an Arcadian simplicity in a pastoral setting.

click to see larger image	Although modest in scale at 45,000 sq.ft., this building is one of Kallmann McKinnell & Wood's most important projects. The requirements called for a new headquarters of the Academy in a residential neighborhood, which would reflect in its architecture a long tradition as much as a commitment to the present and the future. The building was to provide a comfortable home for the formal and informal meetings of its members. Spaces for gatherings as well as for private encounters were arranged at the ground floor, and workplaces for administration and the production of the Academy's publication "Daedalus" were placed at the second floor level. Spaces for meetings and the exchange of ideas were designed as clusters of aggregated chambers, each distinctive from the others, and rotated around a central atrium, while affording differing views of the surrounding park landscape framed by the protective layer of the arcade. The free-flowing space of the atrium and the deliberately labyrinthine spatial sequence of rooms are impaled on a pervasive procession of interior and exterior columns, a compositional device which serves as an architectural metaphor for the dialogue between Neo-Platonism and modern attitudes. A particular classical allusion is the insertion of the amphitheatre form into the underlying orthogonal matrix of the plan. Images of ancient academies, of classical villas and country houses, of Wright and the Greene Brothers, of Arts and Crafts motives and the cool abstractions of modernism are all invoked in the complexities of the design. At its exterior, the pyramidal volume and multiple roof form is composed of a dominant lower floor with its stately columns, and an upper floor of deliberately rustic construction. Thus the image of a temple-villa is merged with an Arcadian simplicity in a pastoral setting.
	*Project Data* Completion Date: 1981 Total Area: 40,000 sf	Awards: · 1983 Harleston Parker Medal, Boston / BSA · 1982 AIA Honor Award for Architecture · 1981 Award for Institutional Design, Interiors Magazine · 1980 BSA Export Award, Highest Honor Publications: · Boston Globe, 1983 · Interior Design, December 1981 · Architectural Record, November 1981 · New York Times, September 1980 · New York Times, August 1980


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