During the 2024-25 academic year, we completed a collaborative and interdisciplinary study of Edwards & Portman’s (John Portman’s) Charles A. Dana Fine Arts Building, Agnes Scott College (1965), documenting and understanding its history, assessing its current functions for the new Department of Creative Arts. The Dana Fine Arts Building, opened in fall 1965, was designed for art and speech & drama. It is now the hub of the Creative Arts, launched in fall 2023, with concentrations in dance, digital media, music, theatre, and visual practices. As we have merged academic disciplines, we likewise planned–and are still implementing–a more inclusive, sustainable, and communal environment. We are looking backward and forward at once: bringing together archival materials and images, recultivating gardens, and incorporating and proposing accessible design – past and future.
Our work was and is in and around Dana. During fall 2024 the Dalton Gallery–the literal and metaphorical center through which students must pass to reach any classroom–was a workspace/design lab for developing the materials for Building on Dana / Patterns in Space (Feb. 7-May 19), which documents and envisions the history and future of the building and the Creative Arts and presents contemporary art on ability and accommodation.
We transformed spaces in the building. In September 2024, we re-opened the original library on the first floor (now the Dana Art Library & Reading Room), which dissolved into the gallery years ago. We also started recultivating the green spaces, three courtyards and the “secret garden,” as current students call it, removing invited but overgrown plants and replacing them with native species to support pollinators. We are committing to maintaining these areas without synthetic herbicides. We are the third organic plot on campus, the first around an academic building. Our plans and process for the landscape unfolded alongside and within our exhibition. They are now in phase II (2025-26).
Making these changes to the interior and exterior spaces and, we hope some day, restoring the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chairs and Florence Knoll benches from 1965, reinforces and expands the College’s work toward greater sustainability and climate resiliency to which our Center for Sustainability and campus community have committed, in partnership with the City of Decatur.
We hosted lectures, conversations, workshops with our campus community, local residents, and at least three groups of visiting scholars during this study year, who joined us to participate in our pedagogy — and progress. We are working on a publication to document and share the work of the project, anticipated spring 2026.
The Building on Dana project gathered communities of students, staff, teachers, and neighbors to share knowledge, skills, insights, and efforts to confront existential challenges through history, design, sustainability, accessibility, equity, and social justice. We are continuing to propose and, as much as possible, adopt plans that are better for all of us and for our planet, recognizing the histories and developing new ways forward, more inclusive inside and outside.
