Mary Washington’s upcoming eyesore: The new theatre building is visually tasteless and depreciates campus

by DEYSON MORKEN

Staff Writer

There is no doubt the new UMW theatre building is an exciting project. It’ll provide students & faculty with much-needed performance space, classrooms and study spaces. However, many other students and I find the building’s appearance to be distasteful.

To understand why, we need to look back at the history of our campus. UMW has traditionally been an inward-facing campus. However, with the construction of the new theatre building, the campus will now begin to face outward toward the community.

This isn’t an inherently bad thing; it will help draw members of our greater community in to see what our campus has to offer. However, this presents its own issues, issues that lie in the building’s design.

The most prevalent issue is its blatant ignorance of the precedent set by the buildings that came before it. Architecturally speaking, the building sticks out like a sore thumb when compared to other buildings on campus.

The modern design is sleek and attractive, but all the other buildings on campus have a more Jeffersonian architectural style, which this building completely ignores. It appears they thought constructing the building out of bricks similar to other UMW buildings would be enough to fool us. They were wrong.

Another issue with the building’s design, one that lies in its modern design, is the dynamic expression-catching facade on the front side of the building. By design, this facade is supposed to reflect and shield the sun during the day. However, I can’t help but notice how something designed to reflect light out would be a bad decision given how William Street neighbors the new theatre building.

It’s hard to say now if this will be an issue down the road, though it seems likely that this design could pose a risk to drivers passing the building. Also, considering the neighborhood around it, it makes you wonder what the homeowners neighboring the new theatre building think. I’m sure all the extra traffic from both people and vehicles could be annoying to the homeowners that were already there before. This would be a nonissue if the building wasn’t facing outward.

The building also has a massive fly-tower which will house a lot of the machinery and pulleys for the main stage. This is probably one of the ugliest parts of the building as designers put zero effort into covering up or decorating the gigantic brick tower. I don’t think it looks too bad from the street view.

However, from inside the main campus, it is a different story. Since the main campus is elevated, one of the first things we will see of the building is that fly tower. You would think that they would put more effort into that part of the building, considering how visible it is from the main campus.

When you consider the cost, it makes you wonder how this money could have been spent more wisely. For instance, Ball Hall is currently undergoing accessibility improvements that could greatly improve the lives of the students who currently reside there. Perhaps that money could have been better spent in speeding up those improvements, rather than going toward the new theatre building.

The construction of this building also led to the demolition of the nearly 100-year-old Brent House. They cited the cause as water damage, foundation and roof issues. They concluded that these repairs would have been too costly, justifying the demolition of the building.

I may be biased as a historic preservation student, but I can’t be alone with the thought that I would have rather seen that money go toward protecting and preserving this historic building rather than the theatre building, considering the design we got out of it.

In all, I am excited for the theatre department, and I truly hope they enjoy their new building and make the most of it. It’s been something they have needed for a long time, and they have finally got it. It just sucks to see the design we got out of it.

It feels like every day on this campus the university is trying harder and harder to destroy the identity of our campus that we have fought to preserve for so long. While I would like to believe that there is still time to improve the design of the building, I fear it is already too late, and the design we have is the design we are stuck with.