AMHERST — It was the biggest, most expensive, most audacious building ever conceived at Amherst College, a terraced glass-and-steel science center nestled into a hill, designed by a celebrated architect.
But now, it is a $19 million mistake, never to be built.
When the college president, Carolyn A. “Biddy” Martin, broke the news to the campus in May, she said the imperative to build partly underground had driven costs beyond what could be justified, while preliminary work on the site close to the center of campus proved too disruptive to dorm life and experiments in nearby laboratories.
Amherst, she said, would still build a new science center, but it was going back to the drawing board to come up with a new site and a new design. “Fiscal responsibility demands that we pivot to a less difficult site,” Martin wrote to the Amherst community.
That a major construction project could collapse at this elite liberal arts college offers a lesson to the many other academic institutions grappling with how to build bold science facilities that position them on the frontiers of human knowledge without draining today’s financial resources. The nature of that lesson, though, is very much in dispute.
To some professors, the building was too beholden to fashion, with a grand atrium — meant to foster serendipitous encounters that spark new ideas — crowding out unglamorous basics like lab space. To others, Amherst’s leaders were brave to walk away, despite having spent $19 million, rather than sink many millions more into an unworkable project.
The $19 million covered work by architects — whose role was nearly finished — engineers, and other consultants as well as prep work like moving utility lines and demolishing a dormitory, college officials say.
Observers see in Amherst’s experience a sign that science construction may be becoming the new campus arms race, on the heels of the rush to offer luxurious dorms, fitness centers, and dining halls. While science labs are arguably much more fundamental to the academic mission, they are also more expensive and complex.
Locally, ambitious science and engineering buildings have opened in recent years, or are in the works, at Brandeis, Northeastern, and on several UMass campuses. Bridgewater State University has a new $99 million science and math center.
Further afield, Cornell and an Israeli college are building a new science and technology graduate school on Roosevelt Island in New York City.
But Amherst is not alone in pulling back. Most famously, amid the financial crisis that devastated its endowment, Harvard halted construction on its vast science complex in Allston in 2009. The $1 billion project, like the ill-fated Amherst building, was designed by Stefan Behnisch. Harvard is now moving forward slowly with what is likely to be a more modest science complex, also designed by Behnisch.
Tufts University scrapped plans for a large lab complex it had announced before the financial crisis, instead focusing on smaller building and renovation projects....
At Amherst, everyone agreed that several science departments badly needed new labs and classrooms. College leaders wanted to preserve the unusually intimate feeling of the campus of 1,800 undergraduates, where small buildings are clustered together, set against the dramatic backdrop of the Holyoke mountain range....
From the start, the college knew the plan was costly, and disruptive. But....
Meanwhile, bid after bid was coming in 5 to 7 percent over budget, according to Jim Brassord, director of facilities....
Amherst is one of the wealthiest colleges in the world, with an endowment of $1.64 billion. But it never joined in the competition to build the plushest student facilities, and instead made financial aid an exceptional focus....
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