MAYA LIN–DANCING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE

This year, the College is embarking on the first two of a series of exciting new building projects, including a new residence hall complex with some 300 rooms to be built in the open space southwest of Robbins Annex on a site that was once occupied by two temporary dormitory structures—Catskill and Hudson. But the first new building to break ground, this fall, will be a performing arts studio building designed by Maya Lin.

In her senior year at Yale University, Lin submitted the winning design in a national competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, now one of the most visited public memorials in the world. She went on to graduate school at Yale, where she was told by one of her teachers, “Don’t worry about deciding between art or architecture, just keep doing what you’re doing.” That teacher was Frank Gehry. Which makes it all the more appropriate that her performing arts studio building will be situated in meadows overlooking woodlands and the Catskill Mountains to the west of the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Fisher Center Artistic Director and Chief Executive Gideon Lester calls the building, “a generational and stylistic dance” between Lin and Gehry, who designed Bard’s spectacular Fisher Center.

In 2017, Lin presented the Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities at Bard College— “The ‘Memory Works’” and “At the Intersection of Art and Architecture.” Her career as an artist, designer, and environmentalist epitomizes that intersection. As Lin writes in Boundaries (Simon & Schuster), “I see myself existing between boundaries, a place where opposites meet; science and art, art and architecture, East and West. My work originates from a simple desire to make people aware of their surroundings.”

The new 25,000-square-foot, highperformance, energy-efficient, low-carbon building, which is projected to cost $42 million, will provide studios for the center’s dance, theater, opera, and orchestral performances as well as a home for Fisher Center LAB, the acclaimed residency and commissioning program for professional artists. LAB has developed and premiered internationally celebrated productions such as Pam Tanowitz’s Four Quartets and Daniel Fish’s Tony Award–winning production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! The Fisher Center is both a professional performing arts center and home to several academic programs in the performing arts, and the need for additional space has become critical. Beyond the new building’s indoor studio spaces, the sloping semicircular design creates an amphitheater that will house outdoor public performances, and the grasstopped roof will integrate the structure into the landscape. In keeping with Lin’s commitment to the environment, most of the trees that are cleared from the site will be used in the building’s construction.

“Bard is honored and proud to have Maya Lin as the designer of its new performing arts studio building,” says Bard College President Leon Botstein. “Her artistry will enhance the beauty of the Hudson Valley and offer a remarkable complement to Frank Gehry’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.”