As Bates continues to transform two 19th-century residence halls into state-of-the-art academic buildings, the college has received a $150,000 grant from the George I. Alden Trust to support the renovation project.
The grant supports the $15 million expansion and renovation of Hedge Hall, built in 1890, and nearby Roger Williams Hall (1895) into homes for academic departments and programs. The Alden Trust, established by George Alden in 1912, supports learning institutions that demonstrate educational excellence, exciting programming and effective administration.

“We are deeply grateful for this support from the Alden Trust,” says Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen.

“It’s a validation of our belief in the important role that the built environment can and should play in the liberal arts experience. These renovations are more than mere facelifts — they support a number of educational priorities at Bates,” Hansen says.

The new spaces are designed to bring faculty and students together both formally, in classes, and informally in lounge and common spaces,” she explains. “This supports our belief that significant learning happens as much in the social arena as in classroom and lab.”

In addition, she says, “Bates’ nationally recognized commitment to sustainability is prominently reflected in the Hedge-Williams project,” which, like all new major construction at the college, conforms to the equivalent of the “silver” rating in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) system of standards.

Finally, by providing new focuses for activity and stunning new visuals at the east end of a major college thoroughfare, the Hedge-Williams project continues the redefinition of the central Bates campus.

“Foundation funding for infrastructure and capital projects has become increasingly rare,” notes Susan Orton, director of foundation, corporate and government relations. “The Alden Trust understands this, and that’s why this grant is particularly meaningful to all of us at Bates.”

The nationally known design firm JSA, with offices in Jacksonville, Fla., and Portsmouth, N.H., did the architectural work for the renovations.

Designed by noted architect G.M. Coombs as a chemistry lab, Hedge Hall was converted into a student residence in 1965. In its return to academic service, it will house the Program in Environmental Studies and the departments of religious studies and philosophy. Currently at 14,764 square feet, the building will gain nearly 5,200 square feet in the renovation, including a major addition.

Roger Williams Hall, designed by Lewiston architect Elmer Thomas, opened in 1895 as the home of Cobb Divinity School at Bates. It was converted to combined residential and administrative use in 1908, becoming fully residential around 1964.

Expanding from about 27,300 square feet to more than 34,000, the hall will house the departments of German and Russian studies and of romance languages and literatures; the Program in Asian Studies; the Language Resource Center; and the Off-Campus Study Office.

Begun in March 2010, the Hedge-Williams project is the fourth and final undertaking of the first phase of Bates’ campus facilities master plan, which also produced a new residence on College Street; the New Dining Commons, on Central Avenue; and the pedestrian boulevard on campus called Alumni Walk.

Anticipated completion date is summer 2011. The Hedge-Williams project also represents a significant act of historic and architectural preservation, as these buildings, constructed within the college’s first 50 years of existence, help tell the early history of Bates.

Hedge and Roger Williams will feature spacious facilities that combine classrooms, lounges, offices and common areas to create intellectually stimulating and emotionally nurturing spaces for students and faculty to come together.

The departments and programs moving to Hedge were previously located away from the center of campus in small wooden buildings. The new location in Hedge will promote easier collaboration and camaraderie both among them and with other disciplines in nearby buildings. Aesthetic additions include new dormer and first-floor windows and a new staircase entrance with a glassed-in stairway that will present an inviting view for passers-by on Alumni Walk.

Among distinctive new features in Roger Williams Hall (familiarly known on campus as “Roger Bill” or “the Bill”) is a “cultural kitchen.” New dormers, an addition behind the building and a glass-metal stair tower will transform the exterior.

Hedge and Roger Williams will be 35 percent more energy-efficient than required by ASTM International, a major standards-development organization. “Green” building tactics include hydronic, or water-based, heating and cooling systems; Web-based processes for measuring and verifying energy use; the recycling of construction waste materials; low-flow water fixtures; and motorized windows for automatic ventilation and mitigation of solar warmth gains.

Nails and nails.

Nails poking out of scrap wood that used to be the walls inside Roger Williams Hall. Nails lying pointedly in wait for a soft-soled shoe. Bent nails scattered on the floor in the wake of a construction worker who, walking back and forth with a crowbar, yanks nails out of the floorboards, one after the next, over and over.

And here we’d been thinking that it would be fun to gut a building. But not for the nail-pulling guy.

What happens to all those nails? We asked Paul Farnsworth, project manager for the renovation of Hedge and Roger Williams halls.

General contractor Wright-Ryan Construction separates its waste stream, he replied, and the nail metal is recycled. “We ask for that in our specifications, but that’s a standard procedure for Wright-Ryan.”

Included in the waste recovery are nails still embedded in wood that has been ripped out of the two buildings and flung out the windows into trash containers for the past two months. When the wood is ground up for use as biomass fuel, magnets extract the metal for reuse.

We encountered the nail-pulling guy and other workers during a May 18 photo tour of Hedge and Bill. The many other impressive sights included a man busting up concrete in Hedge’s basement with a jackhammer mounted on a compact tractor.

But what really awed Campus Construction Update was two mountains of broken wood — well, one mountain and one foothill — on the fourth floor of Roger Bill. These random scrap heaps of wood (and nails!) were once the walls that you pinned your Betty Grable or Jimi Hendrix pictures on, and that you pounded against when the noise from next door was cutting into precious sleep.

Now the remnants of these walls are headed for an open window and the trash container waiting below. One difference from the old days, Farnsworth pointed out, is that a lot more wood goes into a bin now than previously.

“They get charged by the number of containers,” he explained, “so they’re very good at stacking it to get the most out of each load.” That is, someone climbs into the bin and moves the wood around.

Speaking of the Bill’s windows, they too will be pretty much gone by the week of May 24. As with Hedge, the intact units will be sold by a salvage broker for reuse.

Otherwise at the Bill, the concrete crew will soon pour footers for the steel skeleton and pour one-sided walls to reinforce what’s there now. Excavators will trench around the foundation for drainage and dampproofing work similar to what’s been done at Hedge.

In Hedge’s basement, most of the concrete has been poured is done. A major exception is the pit for the new elevator. That’ll require a rigging job that Campus Construction Update is eager to see.

Workers will run steel beams horizontally through holes cut in a concrete wall. Supported at the ends, that steel will take the weight that the wall is now bearing — holding the building up, you see — and then the wall section underneath the steel will be cut away so the pit can be built. Then the wall will be replaced.

Up in the light of day, workers today were filling in the trench around the Historic Quad side of Hedge. Once that’s done, workers can erect staging for the masons who will repoint some brickwork.

Higher up still, the roof removal we talked about the other week is still pending. With recycling on our mind (along with nails), we asked if the roof slates could be reclaimed or reused.

“Although slate is rock, it doesn’t have an unlimited life,” Farnsworth said. “Are there pieces in there you could reuse? Likely, but by the time you’ve handled it 50,000 times, you don’t come out ahead.”

Notes from underground: The new gas line between Hedge and Ladd Library was laid late last week. That line needed rerouting because the addition to Hedge will be built over its old course, next to Alumni Walk. For a similar reason, an old clay sewer pipe on the same side of Hedge will be replaced next week, since it won’t be too accessible underneath the expanded building.

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update welcomes your questions and comments, unless they’re mean, about the Hedge-Roger Williams renovation project. Please e-mail staff writer Doug Hubley at this E-mail, stating “Construction Update” in the subject line.

Click here to view the embedded video.

These days, the renovation of Hedge and Roger Williams halls seems to be all about the concrete — taking it out and putting it in.

In Roger Bill, it’s been coming out. Workers have pulled out chunks of the basement floor to make way for new plumbing and to cut openings for 19 new footers that will support the building’s new interior steel framework.

But wait a minute — the footers will be concrete, too. Replace concrete with concrete?

Say, what’s the big idea? we asked project manager Paul Farnsworth. He explained that plain old basement-floor concrete isn’t strong enough to hold up the steel (and thereby the building). So the footers will be reinforced with those ridged steel bars called rebar.

“The footers distribute the point load of the steel over a wider area of ground,” Farnsworth said.

Over at Hedge, meanwhile, the concrete was flowing left and right. So-called shotcrete, or sprayed concrete, was applied to the outside of the eastern foundation wall. That created a nice smooth surface for dampproofing — that being the black stuff that you could see if you stood on a soapbox, peeked over the fence and looked at the foundation wall that faces Ladd Library.

The same work will soon be done to Roger Bill, with a trench all around the foundation providing access.

Concrete was being pumped inside of Hedge this week, too. Some of it went into the same kind of footers, of which Hedge also gets 19. But some concrete went inside to form something that reminded Campus Construction Update of a Zen Buddhist koan. This “one-sided wall,” Farnsworth explained, is a new layer added to the vertical plane of a wall.

“Essentially, we use the existing wall as part of the form” into which the concrete is poured, he said. “They really just made the wall thicker, and of course there are rebars and such in there that tie the old foundation to this new part.”

Above ground level, Hedge looks like a mere husk of its former self, with nearly all its windows gone and a gaping hole on the north side. Its appearance will get worse, too, because most of the roof will soon come off. We asked Farnsworth what all this exposure to the elements means for the building’s interior.

Interestingly, not that much. The biggest concern is protecting the historic brick as the roof is removed. “They’ll cover it so we don’t flush water down into the brick,” he said. “The other stuff is no different from if you were building a new building and rain gets on it.”

Meanwhile, although you won’t see it for a few weeks, there has been progress in obtaining the steel that will ultimately hold up these buildings and their heavier new roofs. (The wall bricks have done that job for the past century.)

Before anyone actually lays a hand on metal, a steel fabricator needs to interpret the architects’ design. “The fabricator has an engineer and they actually do the measurements,” Farnsworth explained. “They’re told what sizes they need by the architect, but for all the exact lengths, they have to survey and create lengths to meet field conditions.”

The steel fabricator makes a set of drawings that are submitted for checking to the engineer of record, Becker Structural Engineers, Inc., and the architect, which in this case is JSA Inc., of Portsmouth, N.H. The drawings created by Northland Steel Corp. of North Reading, Mass., for Roger Bill, and United Steel Deck, Inc., of Summit, N.J., for Hedge are currently in final review.

“We’re thinking that in June, the stuff will show up on site and they’ll start putting it together.”

Notes from Underground: Watch for some gas-line work in the next week or so between Hedge and Ladd Library. A line currently running in front of Hedge — that is, on the Alumni Walk side- — and feeding Dana Chemistry is in the way of the forthcoming Hedge addition and will be rerouted around the south side.

“So at some point there will be a one-day event where we dig a trench and Unitil, the gas people, puts down a new pipe,” says Farnsworth.

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update welcomes your questions and comments, unless they’re mean, about the Hedge-Roger Williams renovation project. Please e-mail staff writer Doug Hubley at this E-mail, stating “Construction Update” in the subject line.

On a given February night in 1939, an entertainment-seeking Lewiston resident could sit at home and listen to Death Valley Days on the radio. Or he could take in a movie, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, starring Mickey Rooney and Walter Connolly, at the Empire.

And if their appeal was nil? Well, how about the science show at Bates?

True: A big public event in Lewiston during February 1939 was likely the Biennial Science Exhibition. That year’s edition attracted more than 2,500 visitors, including many residents and high school students, during its two-day run, Feb. 23–24.

This photograph from the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library shows future pharmacist Ed Scolnik ’39 in Hedge Hall, then the home of the chemistry department, performing chemical mischief during a skit called “A Night of Alchemy” (hence the alchemic symbols on the sheet behind him). Bates still offers a public exhibition of student wizardry in the form of the annual Mount David Summit, a showcase for students who have both mastered their sometimes-obscure areas of study and can explain their work, too. But at least when begun in 1918, the goal of the Science Exhibition was mostly to “show…the facilities available at Bates for scientific work,” in the words of a Bates Student story.

Indeed, the Student’s long story mentions a slew of exhibits — a live albino Flemish rabbit, partially dissected cats, and an X-ray demonstration — but names not one student, despite the event’s sponsorship by the student scientific organizations.

The 1939 and subsequent exhibitions became more student- and technology-centered. Some 65 students made presentations in ’39, more than a few of which reflected an intensifying belief that technology could explain the human condition. For example, attendees could learn their blood pressure — but that wasn’t all, the Student reported. “Those who came stag tested at a lower blood pressure than those of the other variety.”

“Science and technology exhibitions — the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair being a leading example — were a big deal at the time,” says Rebecca Herzig, an associate professor of women and gender studies whose expertise is in the intersection of science, society, and identity.

Our fascination with (and anxiety about) science and technology, she adds, “has only continued to deepen.” By 1951, exhibition presentations would explain the Androscoggin River’s odor, cancer mutations in mice, and synthetic fibers from the Bates Mill.

In fact, says Herzig, the word “technology” was just coming into much wider use in the early 1900s. “Historians have argued that people were reaching for ways to understand and convey the influence of the bewildering artifacts and systems around them,” she says. “They had to adopt a whole new word — sort of like ‘Googling’ today.”

Old meets new as Roger Bill (center) and Hedge Hall (between the Bill and Dana Chemistry) welcome the new dining Commons (top left).

With last fall’s opening of a 152-bed residence located on the old Rand Field, Roger Williams and Hedge halls were removed from the roster of student residences.

This spring, campus groups and architect JSA discussed the buildings’ rehabilitation as classroom and faculty space. On April 29, one group met to evaluate the Bill’s and Hedge’s overall historical and aesthetic relevance.

“You really can’t tell the early history of Bates without Roger Bill,” offered Kat Stefko, director of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

Indeed, though the Bill had a rebel-with-a-keg reputation as a residence (see “Scene Again”), it was dedicated in 1895 as a home for Cobb Divinity School. Just as Bates was founded to educate Freewill Baptist youth, the divinity school, in turn, was intended primarily to educate Freewill Baptist ministers. It closed in 1908, a sign of eroding ties between Bates and the denomination.

The chemistry building until the 1960s, Hedge has a more-storied architectural history than the Bill. Designed by leading Maine architect George Coombs (he also designed the Kora Shrine Temple next to Luiggi’s), Hedge’s pleasingly ornate style is Richardsonian Romanesque, named for architect Henry Hobson Richardson. Hedge compares favorably to Richardson’s Crane Library in Quincy, Mass., said Rebecca Corrie, Phillips Professor of Art and Visual Culture.

In designing new academic interiors, JSA will be guided in part by the informal, commingled nature of Bates’ academic/social culture. Successful Bates spaces, such as those in the new residence and dining Commons, “weave together formal and informal learning,” as one planning document notes.

Or, as College librarian Gene Wiemers put it, “Bates students like to socialize and study at the same time. They don’t see a distinction.”