Captivated by the details of steel, drywall and bricks, as we often are, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the renovation of Hedge and Roger Williams halls is not actually the most important activity involving these buildings.

What really matters, of course, is what people do in a building during those long intervals between construction projects.

We were reminded of this truth by Ken ’45 and Muriel Baldwin of Cornwall, Pa. The Baldwins, donors to the Roger Williams project, may have a genuinely unique perspective on the Bill. Ken lived there as a freshman in 1941-42, and Muriel took a job there as secretary to bursar Norm Ross ’22 in 1946, when Ken resumed his studies after World War II military service. Read the Baldwins’ story.

Art of Glass

As glassy as Hedge and Roger Williams halls are these days, there is still plenty of pane to come.

At Hedge, the big siliceous excitement is on the Alumni Walk side, as workers are installing the glass walls — aka “storefront” — on the four-story stair tower. Particularly at night, this feature will bring welcome light and liveliness to what has been a dark stretch of the walk.

Similarly, the Bill will have a much larger glass box connecting its old and new sections, and installation of that storefront will likely begin by March.

Also at Hedge, the missing windows in the distinctive old turret will soon be set in, now that brick has been ground down to adjust their fit.

Masonry affected a window installation at Roger Bill, too. If you thought you saw a big bay window in place one day but sitting on the ground the next, you weren’t traveling backward through time: the unit was removed so the granite sill could be ground down for a better fit.

Abandoning glass but remaining in the realm of substances you don’t want to chew, Farnsworth reports that the bathroom tiles — nice big subway tiles, white on the walls and dark on the floors — are installed in the ground floor at Hedge, and the tilers are moving upstairs.

As we segue neatly from bathroom tiles to water (sometimes the writing just flows like Jack Kerouac doing On the Road), Farnsworth notes that workers have begun installing solar panels on Hedge’s roof that will supplement the hot water supply for the building. Similar panels will be mounted on the Bill’s roof, too, at a time still undetermined. The panels are among the features that will contribute to the buildings’ high energy efficiency, a centerpiece of Bates’ facilities management.

Let’s end the Hedge news with a nicely symbolic development: the installation of projection screens in the building’s three classrooms. The heavy screens, which live in the ceiling and open downward at the push of a button, needed to be hung before the ceiling grid can go up.

What makes it a milestone is that the screens are the first features directly tied to teaching that have been installed since the buildings’ conversion from residential to academic space began.

Back at the Bill, Farnsworth reports that the main stairs — climbing the dramatic four-story well that Ken Baldwin’s nemeses once used for water bombs — are complete and in use, offering welcome relief to ladder-weary workers.

And expect to see scaffolding rise around the new addition in the coming days, followed by plastic sheeting that will hold in heat and allow masons to do their work. In fact, they’ve already started, laying a course of granite around the base of the addition. Once the staging is in place, it will be granite and bricks all the way.

All bricked up, too, will be the faux chimneys overlooking the Library Quad that now look rather naked and defenseless in their Blueskin underwear.

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update welcomes your questions, reminiscences and comments about campus improvements. Please e-mail Doug Hubley, stating “Construction Update” in the subject line.

What really matters, of course, is what people do in a building during those long intervals between construction projects.

We were reminded of this truth by Ken ’45 and Muriel Baldwin of Cornwall, Pa. The Baldwins, donors to the Roger Williams project, may have a genuinely unique perspective on the Bill. Ken lived there as a freshman in 1941-42, and Muriel took a job there as secretary to bursar Norm Ross ’22 in 1946, when Ken resumed his studies after World War II military service.

Back then, the first floor and basement were given over to administrative offices and the upper stories housed first-year students. “We were a wild crew,” Ken told Campus Construction Update.

Succeeding generations of inhabitants found their own, increasingly creative ways to ornament the Bill’s reputation, but in Ken’s day wildness involved, among other transgressions, pillow fights and water bombs.

Upperclassmen, Ken explained, would lurk at the top of the Bill’s four-story open stairwell and bombard first-years with bags of water as they entered the building. The ambushees, in turn, would counterattack with pillows. Pity the poor custodians.

“Norm Ross had a desk full of feathers from the pillows,” gathered as evidence, Muriel told us. And Ross did tamp down the high spirits of Ken and his housemates — as did World War II, in a much more profound way. When Ken and other veterans returned to Bates after the war, “it was business, not monkey business,” said Ken.

The Baldwins met in Baltimore during Ken’s Coast Guard service, and he brought her back to Bates 65 years ago this month. While Muriel worked for Ross, Ken pursued an economics degree, and for a time they lived in Sampsonville — the village of prefab barracks erected near Russell Street for returning veterans and their families. (The nickname was for Charles Sampson, an engineering prof who also administered the vets’ housing and was beloved for the consideration he brought to that role).

“Norm Ross said I could write the check to buy the barracks for Sampsonville,” Muriel revealed. ” ‘Since you are going to live there, I am going to let you write the check.’ He said this is probably the largest check you will ever write in your life.”

The deans of men and women, the registrar and President Charles Franklin Phillips shared the Bill’s first floor with Ross and Muriel. Downstairs was accountant Gertrude Cox Campbell — “a very ‘fixy’ woman,” in Muriel’s description — who maintained an attractive flower-filled office.

There was scant contact with the Bill’s upper-story inhabitants or any other students. “They only came when they had to pay their bills,” Muriel said. And the veterans, now out on their own and many with families to support, often had to pay their bills in installments.

“Norm Ross would always call me when a veteran would come in to pay his bill. He would ask, ‘How’s this guy? Can I give him an extension?’

“And I had to tell him whether I thought that person could pay his bill by the end of semester or not.” Her information was generally on the mark. “We were a tight group, really, the veterans and their wives.”

She worked for Ross for three years — “a wonderful, wonderful man whose whole heart and soul was Bates.” But Ross expressed a detailed and fact-driven kind of dedication. Muriel recalled a time when Ross called in the maintenance department’s Albert Johnson and asked him to count the squares in two rolls of toilet paper: one the college’s usual brand, and the other a salesman’s sample reputed to have more sheets, but for the same price.

“Al came out and looked at me, and raised his eyes to the ceiling,” Muriel recounted, “and I knew what he had in his head.” But he counted the sheets and corroborated the salesman — the old brand had 10 fewer sheets — and the vendor won a big new customer.

Ross, she said, “was all business and all for Bates — whatever he could do to save money for Bates. And it was just amazing for me.”

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.

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.

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.”