“We are beyond excited to officially open the Mary Schmidt Campbell Center for Innovation & the Arts, a transformative space that will empower Spelman students and inspire the next generation of leaders poised to become the next technologists, inventors, and entrepreneurs,” said Rosalind ‘Roz’ Brewer, C’84, Spelman College interim president and chair emerita of the Spelman Board of Trustees. “By merging the arts and STEM, the Center will offer a dynamic, cross-disciplinary environment where creativity and innovation can flourish. This is not just a building – it is a statement of our ongoing commitment to excellence, modernization and community impact.”
“The Center for Innovation & the Arts is designed to welcome a mix of people and ideas from across the campus and community. We wanted the building to create new connections between disciplines, and to help find synergies between Spelman and the broader neighborhood,” said Jeanne Gang, Founding Partner of Studio Gang. “Flexible spaces for learning and gathering throughout the building make it a place where collaboration can thrive.”
Defining a new “front porch” to the campus, the Center strengthens Spelman’s connection to the surrounding community by facing out towards the neighborhood and enlivening the streetscape. The building features a distinctive façade, whose materiality and color draw from regional geology and Spelman’s architectural tradition. Flemish bonded brick, which is seen across the campus and whose color recalls Georgia’s red clay soil, is used on the ground level, while flat metal panels on the upper volume give the building a contemporary character that reflects the innovation happening there. The façade’s layered screens and brises soleils create a sense of transparency by revealing glimpses of activity, as well as offer several functions, such as shading the interior and bringing in natural light. The upper volume of the building shades the recessed ground floor to create an outdoor “porch” that offers comfortable threshold spaces between the exterior and interior.
The 82,500 sf Center is designed to amplify Spelman’s existing strengths in the arts and STEM by setting up interactive relationships among these disciplines in a learning environment centered on collaboration. On the ground level, indoor and outdoor spaces—including shaded “porches” that provide open-air areas for studying, dining, and gathering and a lobby that can host performances, lectures, exhibitions, and different types of events—create opportunities for the public and Spelman community to come together. Classrooms and workspaces are lifted to the building’s upper levels, which are organized around two hubs for collaboration. Anchoring the Center is a central Forum, a highly visible, flexible space where students can encounter new people and ideas through pin-ups, performances, and other types of activities and gatherings. A skylight located directly above the Forum brings light deep into the interior. At the building’s prominent southwest corner is the Arthur M. Blank Innovation Lab, an interdisciplinary maker space where students from across programs come together to produce collaborative work using shared, state-of-the-art tools. The lab’s expansive glazing provides views out to the surrounding landscape, while its interior clerestory windows allow students using the quieter work and classroom spaces above to see into the lab and learn through observation. An elevated walkway accessible from the upper levels provides students, faculty, and staff with a direct and secure connection to the campus.
The design integrates several passive shading and cooling strategies to improve the building’s environmental performance. Patterned sunshades and screens on the upper levels are tuned to the angles of the sun to provide thermal comfort and allow in natural light while reducing energy use, glare, and the building’s mechanical load. The central skylight above the Forum also helps to daylight the interior without excessive solar heat gain and glare. Shaded “porch” areas extend thermal comfort hours, allowing people to use these outdoor spaces for more weeks of the year. Landscape features such as soft gardens and rainwater swales help manage stormwater on site and reduce stress on local infrastructure. To further enhance the building’s energy efficiency, Spelman intends to install rooftop photovoltaic panels at a later date. These strategies, along with responsible materials sourcing, will help the building achieve LEED Silver.
All photos courtesy of Studio Gang, Tom Harris and Spelman College.
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About Spelman College
Founded in 1881, Spelman College is a leading liberal arts college widely recognized as the global leader in the education of women of African descent. Located in Atlanta, the College’s picturesque campus is home to 2,300 students. Spelman is the country's leading producer of Black women who complete Ph.D.s in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The College’s status is confirmed by the U.S. News & World Report, which ranked Spelman No. 39 among all liberal arts colleges, No. 30 for undergraduate teaching, No. 1 for social mobility among liberal arts colleges, and No. 1 for the 18th year among historically Black colleges and universities. Recent initiatives include a designation by the Department of Defense as a Center of Excellence for Minority Women in STEM, a Gender and Sexuality Studies Institute, the first endowed queer studies chair at an HBCU and a program to increase the number of Black women Ph.D.s in economics. New majors and minors have been added, including documentary filmmaking and photography, data science, refugee studies and gaming. Collaborations have been also established with MIT’s Media Lab, the Broad Institute and the Army Research Lab for artificial intelligence and machine learning, among others.
Outstanding alumnae include Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, former Walgreens Boots Alliance CEO Rosalind Brewer, political leader Stacey Abrams, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa D. Cook, former Acting Surgeon General and Spelman’s first alumna president Audrey Forbes Manley, Harvard University professor and former Dean Evelynn Hammonds, actress and producer LaTanya Richardson Jackson, global bioinformatics geneticist Janina Jeff and authors Pearl Cleage and Tayari Jones.
To learn more, please visit spelman.edu and @spelmancollege on social media.
About Studio Gang
Studio Gang is an internationally recognized architecture and urban design practice founded and led by MacArthur Fellow Jeanne Gang. Based in Chicago with offices in New York, San Francisco, and Paris, the Studio works as a collective of over 100 architects, designers, and planners that use an iterative, research-based design process to create places that strengthen relationships between people, communities, and the natural world.
Studio Gang’s diverse, award-winning portfolio includes cultural centers, public spaces, high-rise towers, and strategic framework plans. Notable among these are the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation at the American Museum of Natural History in New York; the reimagined Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock; and the University of Chicago John W. Boyer Center in Paris.
In addition, Studio Gang is currently designing cultural, civic, and educational projects across Europe and the Americas, including the new United States Embassy in Brasília; a new home for the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability in Palo Alto; and an expansion of the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock.
Studio Gang also develops research, publications, and exhibitions that push design’s ability to create public awareness and give rise to change—a practice the Studio calls “actionable idealism.” Jeanne Gang’s most recent book, The Art of Architectural Grafting, which provides a new framework for bringing new life to older structures, was released last year in both English and French editions.
The Studio has been honored with numerous awards, including AIA California’s 2025 Firm of the Year, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Company in Architecture, and Architizer’s A+ Firm of the Year Award.