Pablo Picasso said, “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.” From my vantage point at Nutting House, I’ve been a close witness to the demolition of the 1950s addition to the former Northfield Middle School—and to the renovation of the original 1910 building and new construction that’s well underway for Carleton’s Weitz Center for Creativity, which will open this fall.
Yes, you may have noticed a significant name change. While the original appellation of Arts Union accurately described our initial programmatic ideas, the Weitz Center for Creativity reflects even better the range of academic offerings and interdisciplinary opportunities that are planned for the building. This new name captures the excitement and innovative spirit we expect will emanate from the center and throughout the campus.
And, of course, the new name also allows Carleton to recognize the extraordinary generosity of a family of alumni who understand what our College is most fundamentally about. The Weitz family collectively gave $10 million to launch our $300 million campaign, which was successfully completed this past June—and then they provided an additional leadership gift of $15 million to transform the old middle school into a world class facility that will showcase the arts and foster collaboration in teaching, learning, discovery, and creativity across all liberal arts disciplines. Carleton is profoundly grateful to the Weitzes for all they have done, and are doing, to make the College an even more distinguished center of knowledge. To honor them with the naming of this building is a privilege.
Carleton has made a significant intellectual bet that the best liberal arts education for the most talented and curious students needs to involve a high level of visual literacy and an understanding of the role that creativity plays in all intellectual fields. The Weitz Center for Creativity will be a key venue through which the College will realize this promise.
In March 2009 we received a $770,000 three-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a new initiative called Visualizing the Liberal Arts. This grant will enable Carleton to be a leader in developing ways for faculty, students, and staff to create, interpret, and use visual images and media in their learning and work.
We live in a culture that increasingly relies on (and often seems to be saturated with) visual imagery. So it is imperative to understand how images are used to convey information, make arguments, and sway opinion. This visual understanding will let us critique images and, in turn, create images that best serve our needs and make our arguments effective and powerful. These are important goals for a liberal arts curriculum—to set right alongside other vital and enduring goals like critical thinking, clear writing, and quantitative reasoning.
To extend these goals beyond visuality to creativity in general, how do we make connections between one discipline and another? How do we come to see that knowledge acquired in one context can also be used in another setting? The Weitz Center for Creativity will play a key role in this area, as well.
Not only will it house instructional and office space for cinema and media studies and for theater and dance, but the center will also be home for cohorts of faculty that will purposefully rotate in from other academic departments across the campus. When it opens, the Weitz Center for Creativity will have in residence faculty members from chemistry, political science, English, mathematics, and history who will be part of this creative sandbox for several years before returning to their departments, thus allowing more faculty members from other disciplines to join in the mix.
Students, professors, and staff members will be drawn to the Weitz Center’s teaching museum, cinema, theater, classrooms, and performance, rehearsal, and exhibition spaces. We will all utilize the services of the Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching and the office of Presentation, Events, and Production Support, which will also be housed in the new building. Audio and video recording studios, a drawing studio, 24-hour computer lab, and open spaces equipped with hookups for large video monitors and laptops will enable us to collaborate and explore new ways of sharing and creating knowledge.
Great colleges like Carleton are powerful economic engines for their communities. But they should also be intellectual and cultural magnets. The Weitz Center for Creativity will enable us to play that role more effectively as we welcome our Northfield neighbors to film showings in the cinema, exhibitions in the teaching museum, gatherings in our community space, and performances in the theater, dance studio, and other areas.
Just as this building embodies community outreach, it also reflects our commitment to sustainability. Consider some of the architectural and aesthetic principles that underlie this project. Rather than demolishing a beautiful and historic building, we have preserved much of the structure and (in keeping with LEED certification standards) recycled or reused more than 98 percent of removed materials. We’ve salvaged wonderful architectural details, including mosaic tiles and ornate ironwork, which are being retained to reflect the building’s original character. We’re keeping as much of the woodwork and trim detail as possible, and we’re even reusing wood from the bleachers in the old gym as wall coverings.
To keep the momentum going and take advantage of low construction costs, we are committed to getting this facility up and running this fall. In order to complete construction and endow the continued operation and maintenance of the building, we need to raise additional funds—a topic you’ll be hearing more about in the future. To learn more about the Weitz Center and to see a sample of activities currently planned for the 2011–12 academic year, visit go.carleton.edu/weitz. We invite you to join with us in this act of creation!