Blundell House

by Jenny Fulton

If buildings are ideology made manifest,¹ then Blundell House is the ghost of an idea. The Home Economics program is no more, the “women's campus” is no more, and the university struggles to find the highest and best use for this 1961 Modernist model home designed by Vermont's first woman architect.

Built at a cost of $55,000 ($470,000 in today’s dollars), Blundell served as the Home Management lab from 1961 until the program was discontinued in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s. In the Home Management Residence course, senior Home Economics majors lived in the lab home for seven-and-a-half weeks, supervised by a resident teacher, and structured their own program.²

Blundell sits on a landscaped, grassy plot between a grove of mature trees and the Redstone gatehouse, at the north end of the old Redstone Estate. It is fronted by a line of mature trees and trimmed evergreen shrubs and looks southward over the Redstone lawn. The low, single-story, flat-roofed structure is a straightforward, almost textbook expression of modernist design in its siting, massing, detailing, finishes, and interior plan. It seems to hunker down in its site, its strong horizontality emphasized by a broad wooden fascia at the roofline.

Blundell comprises two rectangular wings with a connecting passage/entry. An overhanging, open roof creates an entry space while the rear of the connector features floor-to-ceiling glass which admits northern light. The house was originally sided in vertical V-groove plywood painted a medium gray³ but is now sheathed in a light gray vinyl siding which has begun to pull away in places. Shadow lines are used expressively in Modernist architecture. At Blundell one must get a sense of the original effect from the archival Kodachrome prints.⁴ The vinyl siding disrupts the original vertical rhythm and rotates it 90 degrees. The house presents differently now from what the architect intended in 1961.

The fenestration is deployed singly, in pairs, threes, and fours of awning, fixed, and hopper-style windows which signify the hierarchy of rooms within. A set of four tall west facing windows, fixed pane above and hopper below, let into the dining area. Two similar sets of three tall south facing windows illuminate the living area. Pairs and triples of oblong awning windows above eyeline give onto the former bedrooms.

The Idea

There should be no more question as to the need of education and training for the woman who selects the food, clothing and works of art which minister to the highest welfare of a family than there is for the need of study on the part of the farmer, the manufacturer, or the artist who produces them.
Bertha Terrill, Household Management (1907), 6.

Blundell was the fourth iteration of the Home Management Lab concept and central to the teaching philosophy of the program’s founders, UVM professors Bertha Terrill and Alice Blundell.

Bertha Terrill was appointed to UVM in 1909, its first female faculty member, and established the Home Economics Program which she headed until her retirement in 1940.⁵ Alice Blundell was on the staff from 1918-1938. Blundell was an Aluma of Iowa State College.⁶ In 1871, Iowa State became the first land-grant institution in the nation to teach "domestic science." ⁷ Blundell may have been recruited out of that program to come to UVM.

The first two iterations of the Home Management lab were Terrill’s apartment followed by Blundell’s own home. Eventually the department acquired the “Old Howard Homestead,” a three-story red brick Federal-era structure at 26 Summit St. which became the third incarnation of the Home Management lab. In 1960 26 Summit St. was sold and its proceeds used to fund the next lab home. It had become clear this period mansion with its six fireplaces was an outdated teaching tool, and something smaller and more efficient, with up-to-date amenities, would serve better.⁸

Enter Vermont’s first woman architect. Ruth Reynolds Freeman’s career was marked by a commitment to affordable design using readily-available local and mass-produced materials. The second woman to graduate from Cornell University’s architecture program, she was one of the three founding partners of Freeman, French and Freeman (FFF) the Burlington-based architectural firm who were UVM’s go-to architects after McKim, Mead and White.⁹ In 1948 Architectural Record profiled Ruth Freeman in “A Thousand Women in Architecture”.¹⁰ In 1949 she was elected the first woman president of the Vermont chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA).¹¹ By 1960 Freeman had designed several homes, schools, a bank and a synagogue in the Burlington area. Blundell House came toward the end of her career.

That they were in a cutting-edge house designed by a female architect would have resonated with the women students who took the Home Management Residence course starting in fall 1961. And they must have been a group with diverse interests. In the 1960’s the UVM Home Economics major featured concentrations in Related Art, Clothing and Textiles--training the future interior designers and costume designers-- Food and Nutrition which prepared students for jobs in food service administration and dietetics, an education option for teacher training, a Family Living and Human Development option, a business major and a liberal major.¹² The curriculum was designed for two purposes: ‘first, to provide a liberal education including the areas of learning which are related to home and family; second, to provide several options which are organized to give a more specialized training and background for the interesting professions that are a part of home economics.”¹³ Fifty years later these “interesting professions” are full-fledged disciplines with their own professional training programs.

At its launch, Blundell House was called “the last word in modern living”.¹⁴ Reporters noted it was “fully electrified” and had a “U-shaped kitchen”, an early example of the now-familiar work-triangle concept. The Burlington Free Press wrote a feature on Blundell complete with photographs and interviews with students and faculty. ¹⁵

The lab home afforded the opportunity to “test-drive” the latest in surface finishes, to experience wear, tear, the effects of sun on color-fastness, resistance to stains, and other metrics that inform industry ASTM standards. Furthermore, students experienced group living in an open-plan home, meal planning, and budgeting. The “Home Ec” trope is this was meant to prepare these young Vermont women for marriage but surely it equipped them just as well for living on their own and pursuing a career.

Apart from brief mentions of its dedication, there was little to no coverage either the Vermont Alumni magazine or the Cynic about the design or construction of this supposedly state-of-the-art Home Economics laboratory house on the Redstone Campus.¹⁶ These university publications were preoccupied with larger ongoing campus construction projects: the new Bailey-Howe Library, a cluster of new dorms, proposals and fund-drives for both a new engineering building and a new gym. Entire issues of the alumni magazine were geared to garnering support for these new buildings. UVM’s Public Relations office issued a press release and Blundell’s debut was duly covered by the Burlington Free Press.¹⁷

The future

With the resurgent interest in Modernist architecture and design, it seems the time is ripe for Blundell’s rehabilitation and return to its intended use, though not as a Home Management Lab per se. Blundell was designed to function for a small cohort living and working together on a project, a concept which aligns closely with today’s collaborative, team-based learning model. Reframing the idea this way might open the door to its highest and best use.

NOTES / BLUNDELL HOUSE

1. Thanks to Avery Trufelman, who uses this phrase in her podcast Nice Try! Utopian, Season 1.

2. UVM Public Relations Office press release 12/7/1961, Buildings Information Files, Archives Collections, UVM Special Collections.

3. Project Number 824 - UVM, Home Management Laboratory, Burlington, VT. Freeman, French, Freeman, Inc. Records (microfilm), Reel 18, University of Vermont Libraries, Special Collections.

4. Undated 3x5 Kodachrome print, Buildings Photo files, Archives Collections, UVM Special Collections.

5. Ann Della Chiesa, "Home Economics: Miss Terrill's Triumph," Burlington Free Press, February 28, 1959.

6. Helen Reidy (1923), "Who's There and Where," The Iowa Homemaker: Vol. 3 : No. 2 , Article 17. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/homemaker/vol3/iss2/17

7. https://www.fpm.iastate.edu/

8. Devin A. Colman, Modernist Architecture in Burlington, Vermont(Burlington: unpublished MS prepared for Preservation Burlington and University of Vermont Historic Preservation Program, 2006), 50-53.

9. Amy Lilly, "Vermont's First Female Architect, Ruth Freeman,"Seven Days, March 09, 2016. https://www.sevendaysvt.com/

10. "A Thousand Women in Architecture," Architectural Record, March (1948): 105,107. https://www.architecturalrecord.com/

11. "AIAVT Awards Presented at VTC Student Honors Celebration," AIAVT News, April 24, 2019, https://www.aiavt.org/

12. University of Vermont, Bulletin, (April 1963), 57, 66-69.

13. Ibid.

14. "Alice Blundell Home Management House," undated typescript, Buildings Information Files Archives Collections, UVM Special Collections.

15. Betty Sproston, "UVM's Home Management House Now Open To Public,"Burlington Free Press, December 9, 1961, 4.

16. "Blundell House Dedicated," The University of Vermont Alumni Magazine, January 1962.

17. "UVM Girls Will Learn Homemaking in a Dream," Burlington Free Press November 5, 1960; "UVM To Break Ground Monday for New House," Burlington Free Press, November 28, 1961; "New Faces and Buildings Due at University in Fall," Burlington Free Press, June 9, 1961.

466 South Prospect Street

by Jenny Fulton

The story starts in the middle. On or about July 17, 1940, a two-story wood-framed 1828 Greek Revival house, plus its ell, sleeping porches, and carriage house, was hauled, gingerly, eight-tenths of a mile down South Prospect Street to the southern edge of Redstone Campus. The street was blocked, traffic rerouted, power lines removed, tree branches cut. It was a logistically complex process, requiring substantial advance planning plus city approval.¹ The house’s near neighbors were razed, yet someone at UVM cared enough about this old house to move it nearly a mile at great expense. The mystery is why.

This is a story of a historic university house, home to key players in the early history of higher education in Vermont, which is pried from its context and forsworn by its people and ends up anonymous.

466 South Prospect’s story is an outcome of constructing Waterman Hall and indirectly of the great phase of university expansion undertaken by UVM president Guy Bailey during his twenty-year tenure 1920-40. The building boom inevitably collided with the institutional founding history, evidenced by laudatory writing in the alumni magazines and the desire to preserve the associated historic structures. There’s a hint, too, post-Bailey era, of institutional discomfort with this history.

During the late 1920 and early 1930's the college acquired a number of properties in the blocks on the western edge of the University Green, bordered by South Prospect Street, Main Street, College Street, Pearl Street and South Williams Street. These substantial old houses, several dating from the first quarter of the 19th c., were repurposed as a women's dorm, a music house, and other campus buildings.²

One of these acquisitions, in 1933, was 75 South Prospect Street directly across the Green from the old site of Torrey Hall. It was the home of Dr. Fred [sic] K. Jackson, head of Physiology at the UVM Medical College, and despite the sale to UVM he and his family continued to reside there (Fig. 3).³ Jackson had bought the house in 1925 from Prof. M.B. Ogle in the Latin Department.^4,5 Ogle had acquired it in 1919 from John C. Torrey, executor of the Torrey estate.⁶ John C. was the grandson of Rev. Joseph Torrey, professor of Moral Philosophy, librarian, and ninth UVM president who is credited with seeing the university safely through the difficult Civil War years. The South Prospect property was “the Homestead” to the Torreys.⁷ But a series of Quit Claim Deeds dating from 1913-1919 show the heirs one by one relinquishing their share of the estate to the executor, who sells the property.⁸ The Torreys were ready, or compelled, to let the homestead go. But when the moment came in 1939 to raze it, Dr. Jackson evidently was not.

Jackson had purchased an heirloom. Torreys had occupied the house since 1831 and that was not all. It had once been the home of Zadock Thompson, UVM class of 1823, Episcopal priest, amateur antiquarian, geologist, geographer, UVM lecturer, author and publisher of the 1824 Vermont Gazetteer, as well as almanacs and books for children. Thompson’s published compilations of fact, fiction and anecdote would have been known to 19th- and early 20th century students of Vermont history. In 1828 Thompson had ambitions to run a high school for young ladies and to that end he replaced the old house on his two-acre lot fronting the University Green with a “new, larger” one. The school did not thrive, however, and in 1831 Thompson split the lot in half, keeping the vacant portion for himself and selling the half with the new house to the young Reverend Joseph Torrey, also an Episcopal priest. Thompson and his family left for Canada shortly after, but at some point before 1850 they returned, built a house on the lot he’d retained, and he finished his life as Torrey’s next door neighbor.⁹

Reverend Joseph Torrey, the fifth in the line of Joseph Torreys in New England and recently appointed Professor of Latin and Greek at UVM, married and started a family in the Greek Revival house built by Zadock Thompson. Torrey’s life work was centered on UVM and he contributed much to its growth and stability as its librarian, professor, and ultimately president. His letters, sermons, and other manuscripts are preserved in the UVM Special Collections. ¹⁰ One of Joseph Torrey’s signal achievements was the journey he took to Europe in 1836 to purchase “great books” for the college library, replacing the original collection which had burned. The faculty sent him abroad with a shopping list, he returned with 7000 calf-bound volumes, and they later thanked him by naming the library after him. ¹¹ This is the present-day Torrey Hall.

The house provided a base for Torrey extended family seeking a university education. Joseph Torrey’s nephew Henry Augustus Pearson (H.A.P.) Torrey moved into 75 South Prospect to attend UVM, graduating in 1858. H.A.P. Torrey married his first cousin Sarah, Joseph’s daughter, and after some years preaching at various Episcopal parishes he returned to the college to take up the professorship in Moral Philosophy vacated by the death of his uncle, the ninth college president, 1867.¹² Professor H.A.P Torrey lived out his life at the homestead,¹³ and when H.A.P. died Sarah and their unmarried daughter Lucy continued to live there and were joined by Sarah’s brother, the sixth Joseph Torrey, also a professor and a reverend and now a widower.

In the nineteenth century a two-story enclosed porch, entered by way of French doors at the rear of the house, was added to the west-facing rear of the main house; it may have been a two-story sleeping porch. Another porch on the west side of the ell was also enclosed, giving the house three enclosed porches on its west-facing elevation. The view over Lake Champlain to the Adirondacks from the porches must have been superb.

The story now returns to Dr. Jackson. In 1939 UVM announced plans for the $1,250,000 Waterman Building, to be erected in the block bounded by South Prospect, College, Williams, and Pearl Streets. To date it would be largest and most modern building on campus and as such a significant undertaking. ¹⁴

Siting this comparatively outsized brick-and-marble edifice on South Prospect Street meant three early 19th century houses would have to give way: the 1827 Pease House on the corner of College Street, called “Campus House” and used as a women’s dorm; the Music House next door on the lot Zadock Thompson had retained, and the 1828 Torrey house, occupied by UVM affiliate Dr. Fred K. Jackson and his family (Fig. 4).¹⁵ In January 1940, The Vermont Alumnus reported on the Waterman plans, “…the home of Doctor Jackson, which is one of the older houses in Burlington, dating from the early 1800’s and of historical significance in University circles, will be moved.“ ¹⁶ The article did not expand on the historical significance. By May 1940, The Vermont Alumnus reported again, saying the three historic houses would be “razed.” ¹⁷ This may have coincided with the city park department’s initial opposition to the moving plan.¹⁸

In 1937 the University surveyed land at the southern edge of the Redstone Women's Campus into building lots each with 85’ of frontage on South Prospect Street.¹⁹ In April 1940 Professor Jackson entered into a deed of covenant with the university for Lot #3, as yet vacant, and July 17 the house at 75 South Prospect trundled slowly to Lot #3.²⁰ Campus House and Music House, Jackson's neighbors to the south, were demolished. On October 12, 1940 UVM laid the cornerstone for Waterman Hall.²¹

Dr. Jackson and his wife kept 466 South Prospect until 1952, no doubt enjoying the view of Camel’s Hump from its now east-facing rear porches.²²  The house changed hands in 1952, passing via deed of covenant to another UVM affiliate, R.M. Peardon Donaghy, professor of Neurosurgery.²³

In 1979 the house passed via deed of covenant to Frances Youlton, a UVM affiliate also associated with IBM.²⁴ In 1986 Youlton conveyed the house back to UVM and it ceased to be a residence.²⁵ Since 1987, Campus Police, Human Resources and, presently, Continuing Education have used the house for storage and offices.

It’s tempting to speculate on why once-significant campus buildings get “mislaid”: does their history misalign with the current university mission? Is there no record of why they once mattered? Did Dr. Jackson, perhaps chasing his view or faced with Hobson’s Choice, move it too far off the beaten path? How about a plaque on the house? The old Torrey Homestead exists now without context or name and much of the block on which stood the homes of UVM’s founding community--including that of the man who crossed the sea to fetch the library--is a parking lot.

NOTES

1. The complex logistics of house moving are evident in this description by a contemporary New Hampshire builder working on an historic house rehabilitation: "First question is do you move it with the brickwork (which is much harder) or remove the chimney and just move it with the rest of the house. We had to get town approval, police department on board and most importantly power company to temporarily move lines. We had to supply generators to anyone along the route who wanted temporary power. Moving was one day. Prep was weeks. Logistics, including lining up a trucker who is willing to put a house on I-beams on the truck. Ramp on existing and new foundation. Jack it up high enough to get flatbed under. Cribbing in both basements enough to support the trailer with the building on it. Lots of prep." (Joe Belluscio, text message to author Nov. 4, 2019).

2. Burlington City Land Records (Vol.72), 439; (Vol.76), 514-15; (Vol.119), 697.

3. Burlington City Land Records (Vol.104), 33.

4. Burlington City Land Records (Vol.87), 126.

5. Lester M. Prindle‚ "To Teach Latin Here," Burlington Free Press, June 21, 1921.

6. Burlington City Land Records (Vol.72), 286.

7. 75 South Prospect is so called in a 1907 land record in which Rev. Joseph Torrey conveys "the lot in rear of Homestead" to Edward Booth. Burlington City Land Records (Vol. 58), 24.

8. Burlington City Land Records (Vol.70), 78,215; (Vol.74), 220.

9. J. Kevin Graffagnino, "Zadock Thompson and The Story of Vermont," Vermont History Journal, vol. 47, no. 4 (Fall 1979): 237-257.

10. "Torrey Papers Are Donated to University," Burlington Free Press, July 1, 1970.

11. Office of the President (Joseph Torrey) Records, UVM Special Collections.

12. Obituary, Burlington Free Press, September 22, 1902.

13. "Obituary," Burlington Daily News, January 11, 1917.

14. "Detailed Plans Announced for $1,250,000 U.V.M. Structure," Burlington Free Press, March 28, 1940, 3. 15."Fire at 75 South Prospect," Burlington Free Press, June 5, 1926.

16. "Select Site of New Waterman Building," Vermont Alumnus, Vol. XIV, January 17, 1940.

17. Vermont Alumnus, Vol. XIV, No. 8, May 6, 1940.

18. "House-Moving Job Causes Mayor Some Concern," Burlington Free Press, July 18, 1940.

19. Plan of Lots on Redstone Property‚ Burlington City Land Records (Vol.110), 336.

20. Burlington City Land Records (Vol.117), 28.

21. Waterman photo file, Archives Collections, UVM Special Collections.

22. "Dr. Fred K. Jackson dies at 92," Burlington Free Press, April 6, 1966.

23. Burlington City Land Records (Vol.140), 207.

24. Burlington City Land Records (Vol.263), 665.

25. Burlington City Land Records (Vol.263), 342.

Mabel Louise Southwick Memorial Building

by Jenny Fulton

In keeping with the separate-but-equal principle of women’s education at this period, and to meet the needs of a rapidly-growing female student population at the University of Vermont, the Mabel Louise Southwick Memorial Building was built in 1934-36 to serve as the women’s student union and home base for women’s extracurricular activities. Within seven years, however, it was reinvented and repurposed, albeit temporarily, and this pattern continued through the 1980s. This overview will attempt to trace a “learning curve.

Southwick was the fourth campus building designed for UVM by McKim, Mead and White under supervising architect William M. Kendall. Kendall was also responsible for the designs of the Waterman Building, Slade Hall, and Burlington City Hall. In its late period the firm was supplying universities and municipalities with its Colonial Revival structures, typically constructed of red brick and white marble over a steel frame and deploying the firm’s vocabulary of exterior Classical Colonial motifs with a well-practiced hand.¹ Inside one would be greeted by a splendid curving staircase and an array of interior finishes in marble, slate, terrazzo, wood, and painted plaster, which gave the building suitable academic gravitas. Southwick would follow that model.

The project was launched with an initial gift of $65,000 from the family of John L. Southwick, former editor of The Burlington Free Press and named for his daughter Mabel, class of 1905, who died young. UVM President Guy Bailey secured a Public Works Administration grant amounting to $60,000; other gifts and a student subscription made up the rest of the initial budget.²

Cost overruns plagued the project during construction. By June 15, 1936, the project lacked equipment, furnishings, lighting, hardware, landscaping, and the architect, supervisor and contractors were still submitting invoices. Estimated costs to complete came in just over $300,000, fifty percent over the original budget.³ (Today it’s hard to imagine a public university building funded in part by federal money finishing fifty percent over budget without some sort of public outcry.)

A contemporary postcard showed completed Southwick in isolation, green lawn in front, blue sky behind, iconic tree just to the left. The message: "conservative, safe, trustworthy, scholastic. Safe to send your daughter here." (Especially if she was athletic.)

Southwick’s physical education amenities included basement-level locker rooms with twenty showers, forty dressing rooms, 300 lockers, and an exercise room. The gym floor was the only one of its kind in the state, constructed of southern yellow pine joined together on end, especially resilient and long-wearing. Shuffle board, ping pong badminton, roller skating, tennis and basketball were among the sports. The gym also featured a proscenium stage at the east end, a projection booth, and “excellent acoustic properties”, and could hold up to 750 people for screenings, performances, or other events.⁴

In addition to the gym a lounge, reading room, and music room completed the first floor. Ascending the curving staircases one found another performance hall/ballroom intended for theater and music with a maple floor finished in waxed bakelite. The second floor also held offices and meeting rooms, a kitchenette, dining room, and quarters for a resident hostess. ⁵

“Completion of this building is another step toward developing the Redstone dormitory group on South Prospect St,” wrote the Burlington Free Press.⁶ The opening was even reported in the New York Times.⁷ A well-appointed student union was a necessary ingredient for the separate-but-equal women’s campus.

Off-campus, the women-only gym held its own kind of interest. Another New York Times article about Southwick was headlined “Vermont Co-eds Learning to Dance on Roller-Skates.” This was news.⁸

Soon needs changed. Several hundred U.S. Army Air Corps trainees were billeted at Southwick from 1943 to 1946 while receiving training and study at UVM. Bathroom facilities were substantially increased, the furniture removed for storage in Waterman, and women students lost access to their union and their dorms for the duration of World War II. Women were moved to fraternities and student men salted around private homes and other fraternity houses.⁹ During this period the boiler plant located in the basement of Redstone Hall had to be upgraded to meet the increased demand from the army in Southwick. ¹⁰

By 1946 the university housing shortage was acute and Southwick was reopened for the first time since the war. It appears to have returned to its original purpose, and there is no record in the UVM Land and Buildings Records of reversing the renovations of 1943.

Thirty-five years after it was built, the decision was made to fold Southwick into the design of new Music Building. As sketched in 1971 by Burlington Associates, Architects and Planners, the south elevation of the Colonial Revival Southwick is joined to and partly obscured by a glass connector to the new Brutalist Music Building.¹¹ Further renovations occurred in 1978 and 1984 when Freeman French Freeman undertook upgrades to the physical education facilities and renovations on the first level that fitted the building for its new purpose as the home of the Music Department.¹²

It is tempting to ascribe the arrival of Southwick Hall, as it was built, to the teaching philosophy of Bertha Terrill, Dean of Women from 1909 until 1940. A direct link may yet be found in the archives. As early as 1907 she was a strong advocate of education for women and for developing the confidence to follow one’s own lights.¹³ Giving UVM's women students a separate space to participate fully in sports, to form clubs and hold events, would have been key to that. As a Home Economist she may have understood that by making the right space the rest would follow.

NOTES / SOUTHWICK MEMORIAL BUILDING

1. McKim, Mead & White. Recent Buildings Designed for Educational Institutions, (New York: The Beck Engraving Company, 1936).

2. "Women's Student Union Building,"Vermont Alumni Weekly, February 1934: 183, 184.

3. Ibid.

4. "Southwick is Formally Opened,"Vermont Alumni Weekly, Vol. XVI, No. 21, March 24, 1937.

5. "Southwick Memorial Building Opens Doors," Vermont Alumni Weekly, November 1936: 64. Vol 16 No. 06.

6. "General Contract For Southwick Memorial Awarded to E. J. Rappoli," The Burlington Free Press, August 7, 1935.

7. "Alumni Day Marks Vermont Exercises," The New York Times, June 21, 1936.

8. "Vermont Co-eds Learning to Dance on Roller-Skates," The New York Times, February 28, 1937.

9. "Army Air Corps Soon Moving Into UVM Bldgs," The Burlington Free Press, February 20, 1943.

10. UVM Land and Buildings Records Index (microfilm), Archives Collections, UVM Special Collections.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. See for example, Bertha M. Terrill, Household Management, (Chicago: American School of Home Economics, 1907).

The Lofts

by Jenny Fulton

The Lofts at Redstone Campus is a mid-rise multi-family Modernist structure consisting of two offset curving wings of four and five stories, connected by a single story recreation/lounge area. The entire edifice is raised on pylons, which affords resident parking underneath.¹ The long sides of the structure face roughly east and west, offering fine views of the Adirondacks, Mt. Mansfield, and Camel’s Hump.

The structure is striking for its use of solid colored exterior sheathing panels in blue, yellow, white, gray, and dark bronze rhythmically interspersed with fenestration and define each story and apartment unit. Utility lines are buried and rooftop mechanicals, if present, are not visible from ground level.

Plantings and landscaping, including a pond on the southwest side, are designed to manage stormwater runoff into the nearby Englesby Brook.

At 167,00 squarefeet and 403 beds, it is one of the larger residential structures on campus. It exemplifies a new model of on-campus independent student housing, offering a total of 144 furnished apartments including studios and one, two, three, and four bedroom apartments.²

Notable is the building’s LEED Silver Certification (2013) and its modern European city feel.³ As a university project offered to the Burlington developer Redstone, whereby Redstone holds a long-term ground lease and manages the property, it represents an alternative approach to financing 21st century university housing needs.⁴

NOTES

1. Land Use Permit Amendment 4C0895-5, State of Vermont, April 5, 2011.

2. Zoning Permit Certificate of Appropriateness, City of Burlington, December 7, 2010.

3. United States Green Building Council LEED Silver certification https://www.usgbc.org/projects/redstone-lofts

4. "Redstone Breaks Ground,"New England Real Estate Journal, July 21, 2011, http://nerej.com/redstone-breaks-ground-on-independent-on-campus-student-apartment-project-at-uvm