"If you drive by the campus today, you will see fencing around the building," writes President Tom Greene in the Montpelier local newspaper The Bridge about the construction now taking place on the historic College Hall building. "This is not an art installation. It is to allow the construction folks to work unimpeded while we continue to investigate the damage. It also ensures that bricks won’t fall on the many people who traverse the campus every single day."
After years of expansion and contraction from Vermont winters, the brick work that had been originally laid in 1868 was rippling in places, warranting serious and immediate work.
And the work has begun: construction efforts have started to remove the crumbling brick and replace it with plywood and new interior walls. Over the winter, VCFA will be working to identify funds to help restore the building as imagined by the craftsmen who built it brick by brick 145 years ago.
President Tom Greene writes, "[w]hen I formed Vermont College of Fine Arts seven years ago, it was to preserve this historic campus for educational use and to save close to 150 jobs. My colleagues and I were successful, and in 2008, we created the first new college in Vermont in a generation. Since then that effort has grown into a larger one, a mission to create a national center for education in the arts here in Montpelier."
Read the full article in The Bridge here.