Haverford College Visual Culture, Arts, and Media (VCAM) Building
Architect: MSR Design
Owner: Haverford College
Location: Haverford, Pa.
Award of Excellence
Learning in the 21st century requires active engagement that mirrors an ever-changing creative workforce. Fully developed visual and digital literacy practices enable students to move fluidly between multiple media forms, building upon source materials to create collaborative arts, scholarship, and media productions. Haverford College’s new Visual Culture, Arts, and Media (VCAM) Building provides students, faculty, staff, and the wider community with a new, highly flexible, 24/7 learning environment of intersecting spaces designed for interpreting and making visual media.
"This is a building that is inherently about connection. It has a spatial richness that, while inserting a new series of program spaces within an historic building, retains the experience of a single unified space." ~ Jury Statement
Located in a converted 1900 gym, the facility fronts the historic Founders Green in the center of campus. Classrooms, labs, offices, and presentation spaces encourage trans-disciplinary collaboration and experimentation in digital media, film, 3D fabrication, and material culture. VCAM represents an intersection of the physical and the curricular in which modes of seeing, understanding, and remaking the world are activated in productive combinations. The center serves as a setting where students from different disciplines can work together and engage in social dialogue and hands-on production. The VCAM facility includes exhibition and presentation spaces where students can share their work.