building information + floor plans

Construction of RISD’s new Chace Center is well underway, with the grand opening of the 43,000-sf building scheduled for Saturday, September 27, 2008. To celebrate the new the mixed-use facility at 20 North Main Street in Providence, The RISD Museum has commissioned renowned glass artist and RISD alumnus Dale Chihuly [MFA ’68, Ceramics] to create a site-specific installation for the large special exhibitions gallery on the third floor. Called Chihuly at RISD, the exhibition is but one of the many special programs and events planned for the opening of the much-anticipated facility.

Clad in glass and brick, the new building is named The Chace Center in recognition of the key donors to the project: RISD trustee Jane Chace Carroll and her siblings Malcolm (“Kim”) G. Chace and Eliot Chace Nolen, who supported the project in memory of their late parents Happy and Malcolm Chace. Believing in the expansive, unifying concept of the center, the Chaces also helped inspire other crucial gifts for the $28-million building and related renovation projects during RISD’s Future by Design capital campaign. Once it opens, the new center is expected to become a campus hub where students, faculty and visitors to RISD mix and mingle as they enjoy student and museum exhibitions and cultural programming, research portions of the museum’s collection or head to Foundation Studies studios on the top floor.

Designed by world-renowned architect José Rafael Moneo, the five-story building will be LEED-certified (with a Leadership in Energy and Environment Design rating from the US Green Building Council). On the ground floor, it will house the shop/café risd|works, the 210-seat Michael P. Metcalf Auditorium and a visitors’ services desk.

The second floor will be home to the Gelman Student Exhibition Gallery, a 2,294-sf space that is larger than any other student gallery on campus. The second floor will also include the Dryfoos Student Media Gallery, the first campus gallery on its kind, along with the Wasserman Gallery Director’s Office. “Students will have a large, centrally located space that gives them the opportunity to gain professional experience in curating and mounting exhibitions,” notes Provost Jay Coogan. Director of Exhibitions Mark Moscone [RISD ’88, Printmaking] explains that students will be invited to submit exhibition proposals to an oversight committee including representatives from the Student Gallery Board. Once the concept for an exhibition is approved, each student curator or team will work with Moscone and the gallery staff to select the work, design the exhibition, prepare supporting written material, hang the show, publicize it and plan the opening.

An escalator from the lobby to the third floor will take visitors to the museum’s new special exhibitions galleries. At 4,007 and 2,145 square feet each, the larger of the two will offer the museum its single largest exhibition space yet. An atrium for special events will connect the gallery to the main level of the existing museum complex via the glass Museum Associates Bridge to the Radeke Building, which is also undergoing phased renovations to create new galleries and a rational circulation route for visitors.

The museum’s single largest collection will be moved to a specially designed study and storage facility on the fourth floor known as the Minskoff Center for Prints, Drawings and Photographs. Designed specifically for 2D studios, the fifth floor will house two Foundation Studies studios, along with the Woo Foundation Studies Faculty Resource Room. “Having first-year students go to studio in The Chace Center will give them a natural introduction to the museum’s rich resources, which will become an important part of their educational experience,” Coogan says.

While completion of The Chace Center will help to expand and reorient the museum, it will also give RISD a recognizable entrance facing downtown Providence and open up pedestrian access between North Main and Benefit streets. In fact, the architect was particularly inspired by the site - which had served as a campus parking lot since the previous building was razed in 1955 — because it called for designing a contemporary structure that would help connect and make sense of the half a dozen historic campus buildings surrounding it.

“This is an extremely intriguing project,” Moneo has said. “The Chace Center resists the idea of a single, autonomous building; it has become a way of merging buildings, of giving new value to existing designs and enhancing the space RISD already has.”