Architects Teach Old Dorms New Tricks at Franklin & Marshall

An addition to the front of Buchanan and Marshall Halls brings big improvements to the 1956 dorms. (Chronicle photographs by Lawrence Biemiller)

Buchanan Hall was only 20 years old in 1976, when I moved in as a Franklin & Marshall College freshman, but already it left a lot to be desired. Like its twin, Marshall Hall, Buchanan was a three-story shoebox of a dorm, with 20 double rooms per floor and cinderblock walls that echoed with the music pounding out of our giant stereo speakers. The showers were communal, but that was about it for social space, except for an underused lounge outside of what had once been a dining hall connecting Buchanan and Marshall. Buchanan’s red-brick exterior had one horizontal band of limestone trim and a couple of vertical stripes, but architecturally it was about as exciting as wax paper.

A decade or so ago, both Buchanan and Marshall got partial makeovers—new windows, air conditioning, renovated bathrooms—but more recently they’ve gotten new missions as well: They now make up two-thirds of Brooks College House, one of the four houses to which F&M students are assigned (think Gryffindor, Slytherin, &c.—that’s invariably how F&M students explain the house system). Earlier this year Buchanan and Marshall got a major addition in the form of a new, $2.5-million common area for Brooks students: a living room with a fireplace, a seminar room, and a large multipurpose space, all of them in bold. glassly blocks that pop out from the front of the old dining hall area into the college’s main residential quadrangle.

The improvement is remarkable. The addition has an open, lively feel that couldn’t be more different from the inward, almost obsessive focus of the two original structures. They’re still standing, of course, and they’re fully occupied, but now they’re in the background. Their entrances have been redone to make them bright and transparent and to blend the two buildings into the addition, whose sleek modern sensibility takes precedence.

And because the new space is assymetrical, with its big multipurpose space jutting far out from the front of Marshall, the addition helps invigorate the whole residential quadrangle. So do two earlier college-house additions that the same firm, MGA Partners, Architects, grafted onto opposite ends of the nearby 1964 Ben Franklin Residence Hall (which was, before the additions, so plain that it made even Buchanan and Marshall look like masterpieces). The two earlier additions, Boncheck College House and Ware College House, help moderate Ben Franklin’s enormity as well as its tedium. Schnader Hall, a 1959 building along the same lines as Buchanan and Marshall, is due for a college-house addition in the near future.

F&M has promoted the house system heavily in recent years. I haven’t heard students go out of their way to praise the programming or their sense of belonging to one house or another, but they do seem to like, and use, the new spaces. And even if all the house system ever does is bring first-rate architectural improvements to the residential quadrangle, its accomplishments will have been more than worthwhile.

The Bonchek College House addition to Ben Franklin was the second of three completed so far by MGA Partners, Architects.

The rear of Buchanan Hall maintains its original design.