Artchitecture UM’s Lord Hall seamlessly blends modern, vintage aesthetic

On Friday morning, a crowd gathered at Lord Hall on the University of Maine campus for an art opening of sorts.

Guests hobnobbed and those in the know thanked the donors and made a few remarks about innovation and vision. Patrons sipped lemonade and ate finger food in the shade of a tent. It was all very tasteful.

But this wasn’t your average art opening. For starters, the woman whose work was unveiled was an architect, not a painter or sculptor. And her art wasn’t hanging on the walls. It was the walls.

Pamela Hawkes, principal with Ann Beha Architects in Boston, is the creative mind behind the $5.375 million renovation of Lord Hall. Though she now calls Massachusetts home, Hawkes grew up in Cape Elizabeth, and during her childhood, she often traveled to Bangor to visit her grandparents. Three generations of her family have attended the University of Maine, and her niece is now a student at the Orono campus.

Hawkes has worked on many high-profile restorations in Maine, including the McLellan-Swett House at the Portland Museum of Art and the retrofitting of Bangor’s Norumbega Hall for the University of Maine Museum of Art in 2001. For the last five years, she has worked with faculty, facilities management and local contractor Perry & Morrill to turn the once-labyrinthine Lord Hall into a gleaming new home for the UM art department.

“What I’m so excited about are the connections – the views from one end to the other,” Hawkes said during a tour of the building on Friday, gesturing to the wide hallway that spans the building and leads to a gallery overlooking the Mall.

It hasn’t always been so open. In fact, in its most recent incarnation, you couldn’t get from one end of the building to the other without walking outdoors.

Lord Hall was built in 1904 for the electrical engineering department. A three-story addition in the early 20th century on the Mall side was added to house machine shops, and the two sections were kept separate, and on different levels, for fire safety concerns.

Hawkes’ design unites the two buildings into a multileveled space that is handicapped-accessible. It also seamlessly blends the old-school classroom feel – transom windows, carved wood molding, pendant lamps – with a clean, modern aesthetic.

“It’s really kind of an industrial building, and we wanted to play off that,” Hawkes explained. “We also wanted to recall all the loft buildings and galleries people find in cities where art is being made and exhibited.”

The high ceilings and expansive white walls turn the entire building into gallery space. The neutral palette of charcoal-stained and natural ash floors and spruce green trim echo the slate and granite and wooden dentil molding that adorn the building’s brick exterior. The tall windows, transoms and skylights make use of natural light and bring the outdoors in.

“We saw tremendous potential, particularly in the location of the building,” Hawkes said, noting Lord Hall’s placement near Fogler Library. “We loved the idea of having the arts right in the center.”

That location, as well as the building’s architectural integrity, made renovation the best option. Though this is one of the most expensive renovations in UM history, university relations director Joe Carr said renovations without additions are rare. The project came in under budget.

“The most significant accomplishment is we stayed within our budget,” said Fred Stoddard, project manager with facilities management on campus. “We even had money left over to buy furniture, which hardly ever happens.”

The project was funded by a $4 million bond on the 2001 ballot. Each of the art department’s 15 faculty members donated money toward the renovation. Hannah Whalen of the University of Maine Development Office was charged with raising the rest in private donations, including a substantial gift from the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation.

A dialogue among Hawkes, Stoddard and contractor Jim Nason of Perry & Morrill ensured that problems were conquered as they arose. That way, expenses didn’t get out of hand, even though there were many “change orders” – deviations from the original plan that inevitably happen when walls and ceilings are opened up. It helped that many of the subcontractors had ties to the area and the university.

“They’re more interested in doing the job right and getting it so you’d have something everyone would be proud of,” Nason said. “You’re dealing with businessmen here, but they weren’t out to make a killing on the university.”

And when you have a building like Lord Hall that’s rich in historical and architectural interest to begin with, it doesn’t hurt the bottom line.

“I think things like light and space speak for themselves,” Hawkes said. “You don’t need spectacular surfaces when you have terrific space and fantastic views.”

Though the surfaces she added are interesting, they’re not showy. Walls on the third floor, which will house two-dimensional design and drawing classes, are covered with Homasote, a textured fiber board that turns the surface into a giant bulletin board. Students can tack up their sketches in the hallway and gather around for a critique.

Deep-gray linoleum floors look chic, but they’re still linoleum. Bare and painted exposed brick add texture. In the back stairwell, the original paint was left on the brick walls, revealing a colorful history and an interesting design element.

“With a building like this, you always want to work as much as you can with the structure that’s already there,” Hawkes said. “So much of the original structure was in pretty good shape. We tried so hard to preserve the old elements. Our idea was to make the new elements look like they were different from the old ones but in some way blend them.”