Moses Brown breaks ground on center

THE MOSES BROWN SCHOOL broke ground this week on a new community and performance center. / RENDERING COURTESY OF DURKEE, BROWN, VIVEIROS & WERENFELS ARCHITECTS
THE MOSES BROWN SCHOOL broke ground this week on a new community and performance center. / RENDERING COURTESY OF DURKEE, BROWN, VIVEIROS & WERENFELS ARCHITECTS

PROVIDENCE – The Moses Brown School broke ground this week on a new community and performance center and accepted an anonymous $2.285 million gift for a new “Y-Lab” dedicated to engineering and creative problem solving.
On Thursday, Moses Brown’s Head of School Matt Glendinning shared the ground-breaking for the Woodman Family Community and Performance Center with students, parents, faculty, staff and alumni.
The school is an independent preparatory school for students from nursery school age to Grade 12.
Nursery student Camilla McCleary made the first cut with Dean Woodman, who provided the financial foundation to begin work with a 2013 gift of $5 million – the largest in school history. With an 18-month construction timeline, the facility is expected to open late in 2016.
The Woodman Center replaces the 150-year-old Alumni Hall as the school’s primary performance and assembly space. As the hub of the campus, the 25,295-square-foot building will be a flexible space which can accommodate professional-quality performing arts, host gatherings and symposia, and function as a beautiful setting in which to gather for Quaker worship.
“The Woodman Family Center will be like no other building in this region,” says Michael Viveiros, principal of Providence architecture firm Durkee, Brown, Viveiros & Werenfels. “The unique telescoping seating and hydraulic flooring allow an audience of 475 in raked theater-style seating for performances, and can quickly transform to a flat-floored exhibition hall for community gatherings.”
Once the Woodman Center opens, work will begin to transform Alumni Hall into the Y-Lab, a 5,000-square-foot innovators’ space named for Quaker engineer and scientist Thomas Young (1773-1829).
The Y-Lab’s gift is meant to support to engineering, creative problem-solving and educational opportunity, Glendinning said.
“This incredible gift invests in the very core of Moses Brown – our people, educational programs and the places we learn,” said Glendinning. “It provides our faculty with essential training and classroom resources to fully develop our all-school engineering and design program.”
The project also will support co-curricular STEM programs, competitions and camps to extend learning beyond the traditional classroom, strengthening the school’s ability to attract talented students irrespective of their financial status, with a major investment in endowed scholarship, he added.
The Y-Lab will be supported by both leading-edge technology like 3D printers and digital prototyping software and low-tech modeling materials such as woodworking, cardboard and glue guns.

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