The Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts is holding a community forum about its new building next week. The museum’s current location inside Lawrence Hall is around a century old. The facility being built on the Route 2 rotary will be the institution’s first home tailor-made for its more than 15,000-piece archive. Designs were unveiled last year, and construction began in October. It is expected to be finished by fall 2027. The April 28th conversation at the Williams Inn Ballroom will focus on how the college’s sustainability goals for the new museum building dovetail with the town’s. WAMC spoke with Project Manager Devon Nowlin to find out more.
NOWLIN: We started construction in October of last year, and this month, we're continuing with concrete foundations and basement walls and underground utilities. So, we're starting to come out of the ground with construction, which is really exciting.
WAMC: Turning to this forum on April 28th, this is a conversation with the Williamstown community about sustainability efforts and how they relate to the new museum. Walk us through that- What is that relationship? And what are you hoping this this meeting brings out of the community?
We are hoping to provide the community a context for the sustainability goals that the project has identified. We are aiming for a very advanced certification from the International Living Futures Institute, which is a global body that's advancing sustainability and building projects. The college's Zilkha Center for the Environment helps us set goals on building projects, and the director and deputy director of the Zilkha Center will provide an overview of the campuses sustainability building policy and how they identified the ILFI, the International Living Futures Institutes, standard for this building. And so, when we have the opportunity to make presentations to the public, which we're doing twice a year to provide general construction updates and build awareness and excitement for the project, we are incorporating different aspects of the project along the way in these presentations. So, this one is focused on sustainability. Last fall, we gave a presentation focused just around the landscape, and we're looking in the ahead at future topics to present in these biannual forums.
Now, if you had to point to a few major sustainability details about the project that might be of note to the broader Williamstown or Northern Berkshire world, what are some good examples of that?
One good example right now in the construction process is the storm water structure. So, in the underground storm water utilities that have been installed, we are capturing all of the groundwater runoff in in a storage reservoir that is except expected to meet and exceed 100-year storm capacity in order to reuse gray water in the building. So, we're reducing water usage in the building. We're also treating water and reusing storm water within the building, and then the water is also being pretreated before any of it is moved out into the natural world from the site. So, there's a very intensive storm water capture and treatment. We also are building a mass timber building, and so being able to describe this new building technology and the reduction of carbon emissions associated with mass timber and with the sustainable harvest of timber in Canada, which is where our structure is being sourced from, we'll get to provide insight into that structure, which I'm very excited about, because it will be arriving to Williamstown in the fall and will really be a moment where the structure is coming into view by the of the community. And so, we get to preview that mass timber part of the project at this forum.
Now, lastly, let's put this all in context- As far as the broader timeline of the project, where does it sit right now? And if you had to sort of look at the yardstick here about where we're at and where we're going, where is the journey of the museum at this point?
So, we'll have this mass timber structure installed in this fall, over the fall and winter, and then over next year, 2026, we'll be seeing the facade. It's a masonry facade and a curtain wall glass facade and then an aluminum roof structure, which has got a really fantastic, dynamic sculptural quality to it. So next year we'll have facade and roof, and then in 2027, we’ll be substantially complete in the spring, and then we'll have a period of time over the summer for the museum to move in with their art exhibitions and installations and preparing for class groups to start coming into the museum in the fall, so we expect to be complete and open in the fall of 2027.
