The Davis Museum and Cultural Center is one of Wellesley College’s great assets, providing space for the display and care of a permanent collection of some 10,000 objects and the presentation of a rich and varied schedule of temporary exhibitions and programs. The study of original works has been an integral part of teaching the arts and the humanities at Wellesley since its founding and the establishment of a distinguished and encyclopedic collection of art dates to the 1880s. In 1993, when the Davis joined the roster of examples of distinguished architecture at Wellesley, it was not the first building on campus to house the College’s collection. It was, however, the only one to have been designed exclusively as a museum. The Davis also was the first building in North America to have been designed by Pritzker Prize winning architect Rafael Moneo. Located adjacent to the Jewett Fine Arts Building, to which it is connected by an enclosed bridge, and the Academic Quad, the museum is at the heart of the Wellesley campus. As a resource for academic investigation in a number of fields and a source of innovative programming, the Davis occupies a prominent space at the center of the intellectual life of the College community.

Facilities for the display and study of art at the Davis include four floors of galleries; a print study room; a seminar room linked by elevator to permanent collection storage areas; and the Collins Cinema, a 168 seat lecture theater fully equipped for presenting film and electronic media. The building also houses collection care areas, staff workspaces and offices, and the Collins Café. These spaces are contained within three simple interconnected cubic masses, that in their formal language contrast with many of the buildings on campus by earlier architects who rendered their designs in the style known as the collegiate gothic. In contrast to the variegated roof-lines of these earlier structures the roofs of the lower two blocks of the Davis Complex are flat. A simple, even severe, saw-tooth skylight defines the top of the taller central portion of the complex, floods the top floor gallery of the museum with natural light, and provides a signature feature visible from many places on campus. In his choice of exterior materials for the Davis, architect Rafael Moneo did refer to his predecessors’ work. The building is rendered in a restrained palette of brick and exposed concrete. Several simple metal accents are inserted into the masonry facades of the building. The planar forms of the building’s exterior walls are articulated with unadorned window openings that on the north wall, where they are set in deep reveals, mark the levels of the three main gallery floors of the building above grade. Elsewhere windows signal the locations of entrances to the museum and the cinema, the lobby, and office spaces.

Moneo also used concrete inside the Davis. Here the material is found at one side of the entrance and lobby in a row of columns and the sofit they support and is left exposed as flooring on the top level and in the staircase that connects the four floors of gallery spaces. This stair is one of two major vertical elements of the design of the interior and as the one rising through all five floors of public space in the building provides a point of reference to visitors as they walk through the Davis. It begins on the lower level of the museum where galleries providing space for changing exhibitions are located, and rises through the entry level and three floors of permanent collection galleries. Through most of its length, the staircase is a contained volume, its sides defined by maple paneling. Where the paneling is interrupted at landings it is possible to look into gallery spaces above and below. Between the second and third floors of these galleries the walls that define the staircase volume are transformed into parapets opening the last two flights of stairs to the natural light from the skylight above. This space marks the upper extreme of the second major vertical element of the design of the building interior, a dramatic void immediately adjacent to the solid stair core that descends through the three floors of permanent collection galleries.

On each of these floors galleries are arranged around the staircase and the skylit void which brings natural light down into the building. The galleries are rectangular spaces of deceptive simplicity that provide neutral settings for the installation of the Davis collection. Their carefully studied proportions are ample but not overwhelming and transitions are subtly marked, that between floor and wall by a thin metal strip at the edge of a reveal, for example. Balconies on the upper two floors of galleries and at staircase landings offer views into the three-story volume rising up to the skylight. Natural light from the skylight also flows down light wells at the east and west sides of the top floor to the second level of galleries and through large north facing windows into a smaller gallery on each floor. The Davis Museum is in the process of reinstalling its permanent collection galleries. Familiar works of art can now be seen alongside objects on view for the first time. New thematic galleries offer diverse ways of engaging with works of art, and they offer a sea-change in the way the museum considers and presents its collection. Visitors are invited to discover this transformation and consider new possibilities for interpreting art, and the broader world, through a range of gallery contexts.