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The Smith Campus Center, which replaced a barn-like student center, has fallen prey to a dilemma that confronts all buildings that facilitate change: It delights those who were ready for something new and annoys those who liked things the way they were--even though it was planned over a five-year period by a committee of administrators, faculty, and students.
Art history professor George L. Gorse, who served on the committee, said he was "most impressed with how Robert A.M. Stern's Modern Spanish Mission style relates to key buildings, in particular Little Bridges, by Myron Hunt in 1915, the 'gem' of the main Marston Quad. Stern tried to draw together Hunt's Pomona College plan of 1908-14 with a Classical building--the original 1908 library, now [used for] economics and politics--at the head of the quadrangle and the Spanish Mission buildings at either side with open colonnades."
Gorse is particularly happy with the Center because "from the 1920s, Pomona strayed away from the Hunt plan," and the architects brought it back into focus. "Bob Stern and his junior associates came many times in the early phases and went through the special collections at the Honnold Library, looking through old photographs of the buildings and grounds. They made a special effort to know and read the history of the college and its campus. When the Smith Campus Center was dedicated in 1999," he continued, "Bob Stern gave one of the most illuminated overviews to the history of the campus that I had heard, and I study the campus in my own teaching, at Pomona, of architectural history."
Neil B. Gerard, the associate dean of students who manages the Smith Campus Center, has made changes to the Center, but he, too, appreciates "its beauty and certain architectural elements,...