A laboratory. A center for objects and ideas. A cornerstone of an arts agora. Middlebury’s living room. This is the vision faculty, museum directors and architects have for the new museum that is planned to open on campus in the fall of 2028. The museum will replace Battell Hall, which will be demolished in favor of the new first year dorm on the north end of Battell Beach.
On Wednesday, Jan. 15 and Thursday, Jan. 16, architects Chelsea Grassinger and Hannah Bacon from Allied Works — the chosen architecture firm to tackle the project — are on campus to launch the design process with the fuel of a conglomerate of voices and ideas for the new building. They are scheduled to tour the current museum and the new museum’s future site, consult with a variety of knowledgeable groups and host feedback sessions to acquire the insight they need to move forward. On Jan. 16, they will host a brief presentation and open listening session in the Johnson Memorial Building’s Pavilion from 1:15 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. to answer questions and hear students’ appeals. The architects will return on Feb. 19 and 20 to continue the design process.
The museum will occupy approximately 35,000 square feet at the site of the soon-to-be-demolished Battell Hall, which is 51,285 square feet. The building will nearly double the size of the current exhibition and teaching spaces located in the Mahaney Arts Center (MAC), which occupies about 15,000 square feet. The new museum will cost an estimated $50 million to design and construct, of which approximately $35 million has already been raised. The design will be completed by the end of March 2026 and construction will begin in 2027, to be completed in 2028.
The Middlebury College Museum of Art’s collection of almost 7,000 works will be relocated to exhibition spaces in the new building. The museum will also house multi-purpose classrooms and flexible “object study spaces,” interactive spaces that allow students across departments to learn through hands-on experience with the artifacts, according to people directly involved in the design process. Several hundred students visited Special Collections with their classes in 2024 to incorporate visual culture into their learning processes — a practice the object study spaces will aim to foster.
The back entrance of the Middlebury College Museum of Art, where the college's current collection of almost 7,000 works is currently housed. The collection will move to the new museum in the fall of 2028.
The core team managing the project consists of five people: Richard Saunders, who will move from his role as museum director to chief new museum strategist, Principal Architect Chelsea Grassinger from Allied Works, Associate Professor of Architecture and owner of McLeod Architects John McLeod, Associate Vice President for Operations Mike Moser, and John Benzinger, who is a project executive at Skanska USA, the construction company for the project. When Saunders officially begins his new role on March 1, Professor of History of Art and Architecture Katy Smith Abbott will take over as the museum’s interim director.
The building will function as an academic hub as well as a student center where students, faculty, staff and community members can stop to buy coffee, casually study and informally meet, according to Saunders and McLeod.
McLeod anticipates working with Allied Works to design a space that is meant to be highly interactive, especially considering its central, high-traffic location only a stone’s throw away from other essential arts buildings on campus, namely Wright Memorial Theater and Johnson Memorial Building. A rich aesthetic connection between the interior and exterior space, natural light, appealing views of campus, comfortable furniture and a variety of sizes and types of areas for both intimate meetings and larger events are all features he envisions would curate a magnetic space for students.
“It's not your traditional, conventional, old-fashioned museum where a bunch of objects are carefully, you know, stored away and someone decides what gets displayed and exhibited,” McLeod said in an interview with The Campus.
McLeod also sees possibilities for designing the museum space to accommodate objects that would serve a variety of departments, including the sciences, such as biological specimens. The college owns a number of natural history collections that are currently housed in BiHall but could be partially incorporated into the new building.
“The idea is to connect someone from art history to somebody from physics or biology and have those ideas intersect,” Saunders said. “There is no building [on campus] that I know of where that excitement happens now.”
The idea for a new museum was born a few years ago in conversations about centralizing the arts on campus and the increasingly innovative ways in which faculty wanted to use the museum’s collections to teach, according to Saunders. The college commissioned a study by Selldorf Architects, an architecture firm based in New York City, to generate ideas for a potential structure and budget for a new museum. The firm proposed a $100 million budget, which the college administration has moved to cut in half due to financial constraints.
The location was chosen with its centrality and the inevitable demolition of Battell Hall in mind. Some concerns have been raised about the limited parking in proximity to the new museum — therefore limiting public access to the collection — but Saunders noted that the new location is intended to prioritize student access and that most college museums do not offer the luxurious number of close parking spaces currently offered at the MAC.
Allied Works is a small firm based in Portland, Oregon and Brooklyn, New York with experience designing college and university museums and was selected through a competitive process by a committee composed of the Board of Trustees, administrators and some faculty members this fall. The image in the college’s recent announcement of the new museum is not an official design, but was one of the renderings Allied Works presented to the committee to evoke their vision.
A rendering by Allied Works, the architecture firm chosen to design the new museum that will open in 2028, to evoke their vision for the new building.
On campus this week, the architects and core project team are touring the current museum in the Mahaney Arts Center (MAC) to familiarize themselves with its collection, visiting the future site of the new museum and meeting with several groups on campus to inform the beginning of the design process. This includes faculty with pedagogical interests in the space, the college’s senior leadership group, Landscape Horticulturist Tim Parsons, students from the Sustainability Solutions Lab (SSL) and a number of others.
Professor of History of Art & Architecture Eliza Garrison and Associate Professor of History of Art & Architecture Erin Sassin agreed that a larger, more flexible museum and teaching spaces are long overdue. They are looking forward to a more concise fusion between Art History classes and the Architectural Studies spaces in Johnson, which could allow them to incorporate more exhibition design into their curricula.
“I think we're really excited about a variety of spaces associated with the museum beyond our classroom spaces — places that can be sort of messy and experimental and laboratory, places where you can look at works of art to sort of break down the barriers of formality,” Sassin said.
Garrison, Sassin and other Art History faculty are among those meeting with the architects this week in hopes that they can have a prominent voice in conversations about the plans moving forward, as they work with students to curate the bulk of the current museum’s exhibitions. Limited museum hours and personnel have restricted how much they can engage their classes with the current museum, and they think the new museum will be fertile ground to dissolve some of this rigidity.
“The dream is a space where you can, if you're in a seminar, for example, and you're talking about a particular thing, that you can go to the museum with your students, just kind of spur the moment, walk across the hall and be able to talk about a particular object,” Garrison said.
They also believe that their faculty offices should move to the new museum to remain in close proximity to the spaces in which they teach — though Saunders mentioned that the high cost per square footage in the building could mean the space will be dedicated to other purposes.
“So much of what happens intellectually and academically happens informally,” Sassin said. “It happens by the water coolers. It happens in the spaces that aren’t necessarily in the classroom but adjacent to the classroom outside of faculty offices where people are hanging out.”
Incoming museum interim director Katy Smith Abbott shared her sentiments about student access and inclusivity in the new museum being a priority.
“I think that [the] notion of student ownership and students really feeling this is a place where I don't just belong, but I am contributing and I have something to bring to this that will make the spaces and the opportunities and the exhibits richer,” Smith Abbott said.
In the approximately three and a half years before the new museum opens, Smith Abbott will have to carefully consider which items to acquire with the annual budget dedicated to collections and how they may fit into the new space.
In the coming months, museum staff will give tours of the museum’s current space in the MAC to the chairs of programs in theater, dance and performing arts to invite them to think about how it could be used in the future, according to Saunders and Smith Abbott.
The incoming Feb class of 2028.5 will be the first wave of students on campus to see the new museum come alive, in their very last semester. In a college student’s four-year on-campus lifespan, that day may feel eons away — but for the architects, administrators, faculty, staff and numerous others dedicating themselves to the project, it is worth the wait.
“We need to kind of think ahead to like what our department might look like in 15, 20 years,” Garrison said. “The spaces that are part of that museum are really going to have to grow right with our curriculum and with the kinds of students who are going to be here in a decade.”
Madeleine Kaptein '25.5 (she/her) is a managing editor.
Madeleine previously served as a staff writer, copy editor and local editor. She is a Comparative Literature major with minors in German and Art History. In Spring 2024, she studied abroad in Mainz, Germany, from where she wrote for the Addison Independent about her host country. In her free time, she enjoys journaling, long walks and runs, and uncomplicated visual arts projects.
