photo:Iwan Baan

The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership in Kalamazoo

At 10,000 square feet, the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, on the campus of Kalamazoo College here, is modest. It doesn’t pierce a skyline or explode with titanium panels and big glass sails.

All the more reason to make a pilgrimage. It’s a high-tech throwback by Studio Gang, the well-known Chicago architecture firm led by Jeanne Gang. A Y-shaped, steel-frame, single-story pavilion, the building, on the site of what had been the college president’s house, makes itself improbably at ease among leafy blocks of stuffy neo-Georgian brick homes. Its three concave facades, with cordwood masonry cladding, can, in certain light, almost make you think of lizard skin. Porthole windows, echoing the cordwood, float like soap bubbles along two of the facades. Inside, a ’60s-style, kidney-shaped conversation pit comes with a fireplace.

Imagine a log cabin the Jetsons ordered from the 2062 Whole Earth Catalog, and you start to get the picture.

What makes the building special is partly the novel form, which grows straight out of the center’s ambitions. It’s also the element of handicraft (those cordwood masonry exteriors) when so much marquee architecture leans on high-tech materials and 3-D printing.....Continue Reading

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