New Student Center

St. Mary's College of Maryland
St. Mary's City, MD

The St. Mary’s College campus center is located in St. Mary’s historic district. It is sited along the Patuxent River among colonial and contemporary collegiate buildings. The addition and renovation contains 50,000 gross square feet of dining hall and servery, student lounges, movie theater and student organization areas. The articulated brick building with an arched base, sloped copper roofs and gabled pavilions complements this historic context.

The interiors feature the light-filled, trussed great room for student dining and special events, student lounges for informal student activities, student organization offices, student radio station, campus bookstore/cafe and a movie theater. Landscaped terraces and a balcony complete the building’s relationship to its site.

The other buildings at St. Mary’s College range in age from the just completed to three centuries old, but they all have in common red brick walls with punched openings, pitched roofs and most of them are medium scale. Few, however, are colonial or neo-colonial. Most of the new work, like the student center is an abstracted adaptation of colonial or traditional elements. There is, in fact, a real consistency.

Please note that the student center is, in fact, a large series of additions that remodel, engulf and cover up an existing inappropriate building.