Ford Student Center Opens at Amherst College

AMHERST, MASSACHUSETTS, USA — The Ford Student Center officially opens today with a campus-wide open-house celebration at Amherst College. Students, faculty, staff, trustees, project partners, donors, and members of the wider Amherst community gather to inaugurate the new Student Center & Dining Commons.

The project transforms and extends the former Merrill Science Center into a new center for campus life. Rather than replacing the existing building, the design retains and repurposes its concrete structure at the lower two levels. Two new floors in mass timber, made from black spruce sourced in Canada, complete the building above. This approach reduces material waste and retains the embodied carbon of the existing structure, while establishing a new architectural expression that responds to the scale and landscape of the campus.

Situated between the historic upper quad and the lower greenway, the building connects different parts of the campus through a vertical and horizontal network of shared spaces. Students enter at the greenway on the ground floor and from the quad on the third floor. An internal passage links these entrances and connects the building’s dining, social, cultural, and recreational spaces.

The new program includes Betty’s Kitchen, the main dining space, alongside the Alumni Pub, Stanley’s Café, student organization rooms, cultural resource centers, flexible event spaces, a radio station, music practice rooms, a theater, movement and interfaith spaces, lounges, and terraces. Large windows and outdoor spaces frame views towards the surrounding landscape and the Holyoke Range.

Quotes:

“This building will be the crossroads of campus life at Amherst. It is designed to bring students together in the ways that matter most — spontaneously, across differences, in the conversations that no algorithm can replicate.” — Bill Ford ’83, P’13

‘We kept the building’s existing structure and material character, combining adaptive reuse with a new mass-timber addition. The project links the site’s history to Amherst College’s future — creating communal spaces for student life and wellbeing and pursuing climate action as a shared priority. Achieving this level of ambition is owed to an exceptionally committed client and project team.’ — Christoph Röttinge, Partner in Charge, H&dM