Beyer Blinder Belle helps Stony Brook get a makeover.

Dr. Shirley Strum Kenny, president of Stony Brook University, joined with University and state officials on Wednesday, Sept. 21, at a University convocation and opening ceremony for a major new campus facility: the 104,000 s/f Humanities Building, designed by Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners LLP.

Realized at a cost of $20 million, the project provides 52,000 s/f of new space and 52,000 s/f of completely renovated space for several of the University's departments of language, communication and culture studies. While offering a variety of spaces--from seminar rooms and offices to classrooms, lecture halls and a poetry center--the building also fulfills important symbolic and social roles for Stony Brook. It affirms the importance of the humanities at an institution that has been known primarily for science and research; and it contributes the next element to a decade-long reshaping of the campus.

When construction began in 1962, the State University of New York envisioned Stony Brook as a commuter school. The campus was therefore built for automobiles, with the buildings facing onto parking lots. When Dr. Kenny became president in 1994, one of her earliest initiatives was to call in John Belle, a founding partner of Beyer Blinder Belle, to ask what should be done about a campus she described as "neo-penal."

Beyer Blinder Belle's solution was the Academic Mall Landscape Plan, created in collaboration with Lynden B. Miller Public Garden Design. The plan has replaced vast areas of pavement with lawns, gardens, trees, walkways and fountains. The first phase, completed in 2000, "put the stony brook back into Stony Brook," says Belle, by building a central fountain with a watercourse at the center of the newly landscaped, six-acre Academic Mall. Phase two replaced a concrete pit with the Staller Terrace, a green, stepped space adjacent to the new Staller Center for the Arts. Phase three, which is in construction, encompasses a new campus entry road and entrance circle.

"These three landscape programs have radically changed the campus from a concrete jungle to a greensward," Belle explains. "They are a wonderful illustration of how a relatively modest landscape project, budgeted at $12 million in all, can completely transform a university campus and how on campuses outdoor spaces are as important as indoor spaces for social and intellectual activity."

Beyer Blinder Belle has now integrated the Humanities Building into this overall plan. The entrance to the building is oriented toward the central fountain of the Academic Mall and is gently curved to echo the fountain's form. The exterior is principally made of brick, like the original Stony Brook buildings, but the material has been upgraded to a livelier orange-red color and now has a limestone trimming. The entrance leads into a skylit, two-story atrium, which links the new building to the renovated building and provides a common space for all of the departments in the building. An economic powerhouse in Long Island, Stony Brook University has a $2.5 billion impact on the local, state and regional economy. In June 2005, the University announced a $300 million capital campaign to continue its building initiatives, to create endowed professorships and to fund student scholarships and fellowships.