MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE CELEBRATES COMPLETION
OF HEART OF UNIFIED SCIENCE CENTER

Kendade Hall features a four-story atrium that will serve as a social center
and a space for large-scale experiments.

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. ­ The completion of Kendade Hall, the heart of a new unified science center that incorporates the best and most creative thinking on the teaching of the sciences, will be celebrated in a brief ceremony on Wednesday, September 4 at 5 PM on the Mount Holyoke College campus.

Kendade is a four-story, 40,000-square-foot building that connects the existing Carr and Clapp laboratories and Shattuck and Cleveland halls. Kendade houses classrooms, faculty offices, and laboratories, including labs dedicated to molecular biology and genetics, advanced physics, and optics. Once construction is completed in the fall of 2003, the $34.5 million unified science center will provide 116,000 gross square feet of new construction and renovated space, and will be home to eight departments: biological sciences, biochemistry, chemistry, physics, mathematics, astronomy, earth and environment, and computer science.

The most striking feature of Kendade’s interior, its four-story atrium, is also a key component in the College’s efforts to encourage greater interaction and more permeable boundaries among the sciences. The walls of the atrium will literally provide windows onto laboratory work being done in the various sciences, while the 3,000-square-foot atrium itself will serve as both a place for socializing and a space for performing large-scale experiments.

When the unified science center is finished, it will be “a facility that promotes genuine cross-disciplinary interaction between the sciences, thereby reflecting the way cutting-edge science is done at disciplinary boundaries by collaborating groups of people,” says Donal O'Shea, dean of faculty.

Imagery to be installed after Kendade’s opening will further weave the sciences into the structure and encourage creative thinking. The main entrance portico will feature a spiral table of the elements carved into granite blocks, and the custom-made flooring on the first-, second-, and third-floor balconies will depict a series of neurons, the solar system, and a human female karyotype showing all forty-six chromosomes. The most ambitious, unusual, and inspired touch will be the analemma, an elongated figure-eight created by the relative motion of the Earth and sun through the cycle of a year. Kendade’s analemma will be created by a lens mounted high in the building’s southern wall that will gather the sun’s rays and project an image of the solar disc onto the atrium floor. That lens is expected to be in place by the fall of 2003.

The largest campus building project since the renovation and expansion of Williston Library in the early 1990s, the science center has already attracted several of the largest gifts in Mount Holyoke’s history, including an anonymous $10 million naming gift for Kendade. The center was designed, and is being built, to meet high standards for a wide variety of measures in the areas of sustainable technologies and practices. The standards conform to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) criteria for a “green building” as established by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC).

Ground was broken for Kendade in May 2001. The building was designed by the firm of Einhorn Yaffee Prescott Architecture and Engineering, P.C., which specializes in the design of environments for colleges and universities with an emphasis on science and technology and sustainable design.

The Sciences at Mount Holyoke College

The College has played a remarkable role in educating women scientists since its founding in 1837. For most of the twentieth century, Mount Holyoke graduated more women who went on to receive doctorates in the physical sciences and engineering than any other university or college in the nation. Into the 1980s, despite the College’s small size, Mount Holyoke was the undergraduate college of more women who went on to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry than any other institution in the country. In fact, as of the early 1990s, one in four women chemists in the United States had done her undergraduate work at Mount Holyoke. Even with the opening of greater educational opportunities for women in recent decades, a 1996 study places Mount Holyoke among the top eight institutions nationwide graduating (between 1976-86) the highest number of women who went on to earn doctoral degrees in the physical sciences (chemistry, mathematics/ computer science, and physics/engineering). Of these eight institutions, six are research universities—only Mount Holyoke and Bryn Mawr are liberal arts colleges.

Between one quarter and one third of Mount Holyoke students currently major in science or mathematics—double the proportion of women who major in math or science at comparable co-educational institutions. At Mount Holyoke, all students must take at least two science courses and all core science courses have an integral laboratory component. Collaborative research among faculty and students is a critical element of the academic culture at the College, providing our students with outstanding mentoring and access to sophisticated scientific instrumentation and techniques that few undergraduates experience.