RISD opens Chace Center

From my essay on RISD’s Chace Center:

Rhode Island School of Design’s new Chace Center, which celebrates its grand opening this Saturday, September 27, is the physical embodiment of the 131-year-old institution’s effort to rebrand itself as a more open place, a RISD that is more engaged with the world — particularly the part that includes Providence.

So the $34 million, five-story, 43,000 square foot Chace Center fronts North Main Street, faces downtown, and has the school’s name written in big silver letters across the facade. “We’ve occupied so many borrowed and reused buildings. We’ve never been in a place that you know is RISD,” James Hall, assistant director of the RISD Museum, tells me. “This is the front door of RISD . . . . For the first time in our history, we’re saying, ‘This is where we are. Please come in.’ ”

Read the rest here.

Pictured from top to bottom: The front of the building, the side, the lobby, the student gallery, the curatorial spaces on the fourth floor. First and last photos by Warren Jagger Photography, 2008, courtesy of RISD Museum of Art. The rest of the photos are by The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research.