New Neilson July 7, 2021 A New Home for Past Presidents BY Stacey Schmeidel
As Neilson Library prepares to fully re-open to the campus community and the general public this fall, staff are also preparing to welcome some very special guests.
The portraits of Smith’s former presidents long housed near the main staircase in College Hall will be moved to a place of prominence in the new Neilson later this summer.
President Kathleen McCartney says that the 10 portraits will be installed in the newly named Klingenstein Browsing Room the beloved first-floor gathering space formerly known simply as the Browsing Room.
“Smith is richly informed by our history, and the portraits are a part of our history,” McCartney notes. “There are two reasons to display them in Neilson Library. The first is practical, in that we have run out of space in College Hall. More importantly, the portraits will be more visible to more members
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For more than a year, I’ve kept a folder on my desk that was stuffed full of scribbled notes for the story I was working on when the pandemic hit. Every journalist, it seems, has a version of this folder ideas rendered moot by the arrival of our global calamity.
The story, about the architecture of libraries, was also a story about how women design for women. The library in question was one I knew intimately: Neilson Library, the central library at Smith College, the women’s college in Northampton, Mass., where I studied as an undergraduate.
My focus was a $120-million renovation of that space designed by Maya Lin Studio, in collaboration with Boston-based firm Shepley Bulfinch, which had devised Neilson’s master plan.