Moreover, earlier this year, in a cruel twist of fate, Lin’s husband of nearly 25 years, Daniel Wolf, died of a sudden heart attack. “It’s good that it’s finally being written about.” “Before, it was spoken of but not publicly written about,” she said. I’ve had friends in New York spat upon and called horrible names.” I had a friend who was asked to leave a restaurant. “I started hearing from friends of mine who are Asian how they were being accosted. “I was in the subway in February of last year and I sneezed and the entire subway car moved away from me,” she told me in a telephone interview last month. Lin, meanwhile, was grappling with the rising tide of hate directed at Asian Americans during the pandemic. (A later inquiry found that the area had been closed to Smith students and faculty for the summer and that this may have motivated the initial call.)Īs the country grapples with the role of systemic racism, The Times has committed to examining its past. In addition, the college found itself in the crucible of the cancel-culture wars this winter after the public resignation of a librarian who alleged a “racially hostile environment” toward white people, and the resurfacing of a 2018 incident in which a Black student alleged discrimination after being questioned by a campus police officer while eating in a dorm area. I had no role, decision-making or otherwise, in the renovation plans.) (Full disclosure: I served on Smith’s alumni association board for three years in the aughts and spent another three years on an alumni committee that helped support the libraries by raising funds for author lectures and digitization efforts. Though the library was being paid for out of a separate capital budget and had been financed, in part, by almost $43 million in private philanthropy, the toll the pandemic took on the school’s workers made a high-profile construction project feel ill-timed. In response, Smith increased its endowment draw, the senior leadership team took voluntary pay cuts and more than 200 staff members were furloughed. The college faced a $35 million shortfall in its 2020-21 budget. Like every other institution that wasn’t Wall Street, Smith College was battered by the pandemic. In that same period, there also have been a wave of seismic societal shifts as the pandemic’s inequitable tolls, combined with the uprisings for Black lives, force us to reckon with systemic disenfranchisement. In the 14 months since I first began reporting this story, there has been illness and isolation and death - tolls so great they only register as abstractions: 577,000 dead in the U.S. (Maya Lin Studio / Madison Square Park Conservancy) She described how much Smith had meant to her and her mother. In late February 2020, as the novel coronavirus was creeping into the U.S., I visited Lin at her studio, a comfortably worn loft space in downtown Manhattan. ![]() ![]() Lin is also someone with a profound emotional connection to Smith College: Her mother, Julia Ming Hui Chang Lin, landed at Smith in 1949 after escaping the Communist invasion of Shanghai on a fishing boat‚ her Smith acceptance letter and two $10 bills sewn into her dress. And Maya Lin Studio, of course, is run by the celebrated designer behind the groundbreaking Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., as well as the intimate Langston Hughes Library in Tennessee. ![]() Shepley has a deep know-how in academic design, including plenty of libraries. ![]() My focus was a $120-million renovation of that space designed by Maya Lin Studio, in collaboration with Boston-based firm Shepley Bulfinch, which had devised Neilson’s master plan. The library in question was one I knew intimately: Neilson Library, the central library at Smith College, the women’s college in Northampton, Mass., where I studied as an undergraduate. The story, about the architecture of libraries, was also a story about how women design for women. Every journalist, it seems, has a version of this folder - ideas rendered moot by the arrival of our global calamity. For more than a year, I’ve kept a folder on my desk that was stuffed full of scribbled notes for the story I was working on when the pandemic hit.
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