photo by Sally McCay
Center point
Dreaming to planning to building, UVM’s new Dudley H. Davis Student Center has been a long-time coming. Envisioned as a “crossroads” of the University and a focal point for campus life, the center has largely lived up to those expectations during its first semester in use. The best way to experience the Davis Center, of course, is with a walk through the building’s four floors. Short of that, VQ offers a tour through photographs and words, a glimpse of the center, the people who use it, and its impact on day-to-day life at the University of Vermont.
Photo by Bob Handelman
Fries with your business
Covering ground in the Davis Center with DaVaughn Vincent-Bryan takes time. It’s not that the Student Government Association vice-president is slow; it’s just that he seems to know every one of UVM’s other 9,135 undergrads. There are going to be some chest bumps, some hugs, and some “Hey, dudes” en route from the third-floor SGA headquarters down to the first-floor Brennan’s Pub. Vincent-Bryant prefers Brennan’s for one-on-one meetings with student senators or small groups. “There are seventy TVs, people yelling…there’s enough energy down here to make it unique and useful,” Vincent-Bryan says. (Maybe not seventy TVs, but we are encircled by six big screens aglow with Red Sox third-baseman Mike Lowell’s mug, and there are occasional shouts—“Eighty-nine!”—as lunch orders roll up.) People, noise, and maybe a plate of tenders and fries are just the mix in which to get business done for Vincent-Bryan. He’d like to see the volume turned up even higher and, toward that end, is working to get students more involved in center programming. Davis, he says, “has a steady pulse, but we want a stronger heartbeat.” Measuring that rhythm may be as simple as keeping an ear tuned to what students call the building. Whether it’s the “DC” that peppers the center’s marketing materials or the should-have-seen-that-coming student twist on Dudley H. Davis Student Center—affectionately, “The Dud”—the use of a nickname is good news in Vincent-Bryan’s view: “Those folks are owning it.”
We can dance if we want to
To the thousands of Main Street drivers who pass the Davis Center daily, the arched windows of the Grand Maple Ballroom are one of the building’s most striking and intriguing features. Seen from the outside, they beg the question: What’s in there? Answer: One of the most versatile spaces in the center and on the entire campus. Ballroom, yes, over the past five months dances many and varied have been danced under the room’s peaked ceilings—swing at the Campaign for the University of Vermont celebration, Bollywood-inspired moves at a joyous Indian Student Association Diwali Night, and whatever the spirit moved when Devendra Banhart and Celestial Pesto took the stage. But the room has also proven itself as movie theater, meeting space, and recital hall. The ballroom has hosted the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Vermont farmers talking biofuels, wedding receptions, and the UVM Orchestra in concert. No doubt, the room can hold a crowd. But on the rare occasions it’s quiet, the Grand Maple is also a great place to slip in, find a spot by a window, and read with a Green Mountain view.
Keeping it local
Step into the Growing Vermont store and, from the recycled barn planks underfoot on up, it’s evident that something different is going on than the standard retail you’d expect in a student center. There’s a sort of new age country store vibe. The shelves are filled with an eclectic mix of products—food to clothes to crafts to whey-based wood finish—all united by the fact they were made by Vermont businesses or artisans. Also different, Growing Vermont is as much lab or classroom as store. Students work at all aspects of the store’s operation and management with guidance from Jeffrey Doane ’07, store manager, and faculty member Michael Moser from the Center for Rural Studies. Growing Vermont provides students with the opportunity to gain firsthand experience with entrepreneurship while earning academic credit. Also key to the store’s mission: promoting the virtues of buying local and boosting Vermont businesses, from the well-established to those just starting out. Doane, a community development and applied economics major who went straight from studying entrepreneurship to applying it in his new job, says Growing Vermont is on track to meet its three-year break-even goal. As a CD of “White Christmas” plays in the background, Doane says the student-run store is looking for an up-tick in holiday gift sales. Until then, they can always count on a steady stream of customers drawn in by Lake Champlain Chocolates.
How green is my center
Though the Davis Center has been built to exacting green building standards, chances are some of those virtues might go unnoticed (compressed vegetable oil in the elevator hydraulics comes to mind) or underappreciated (did you get a good look at the flushless urinals?). That said, it’s tough to miss the center’s green features thanks to small plaques posted throughout the building. Pause to read and you’ll learn that the roof slate is from Fair Haven, Vermont, not to mention the maple from Shelburne, and the bricks from East Highgate; that 95 percent of the cleaning products in the building are produced by green standards; and even that wooden plaque itself was harvested from UVM’s carefully managed Jericho Research Forest. The environmentally introspective building will take it up a notch with the opening of the Sodexho Sustainability LUCID Design monitoring system, real-time energy use data that will be displayed at the Main Street tunnel entrance to Davis. The efforts put Davis in position to become the nation’s first student center certified at the silver level for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.
Photo by Sally McCay
On Air, In View
DJ Ranger Rick (AKA Kathleen Stutzman ’09) leads the way through a canyon of gray metal shelves jammed full of compact discs. WRUV’s program director steps over boxes yet to be unpacked, stacks yet to be sorted, and turns a corner to the back aisle and the station’s trove of vinyl. It’s “amazing jazz and blues,” she says, one of the largest collections in the state. What’s more, the records are working artifacts of ’RUV’s long history as UVM’s outpost on the brave frontier of college radio. Stutzman—a forestry major whose “Goodbye, Blue Monday!” show features indie rock, spoken word, and mystery animal sound contests—says moving the station out of Billings meant literally peeling layers of history from the old studio walls. The bare beige walls of Davis seem to beg the students to start a new poster and sticker history of their own, Stutzman admits. “We’re working out the space, figuring out what we can put up,” she says. Also new, a higher profile for the station due to the control room’s window on a corridor in the center. Working DJs are now on view. “People walk by and wonder what’s in here,” Stutzman says. “It’s cool; it’s brought us more exposure in that way.”
Photo by Sally McCay
Sweet Home ‘Chikago’
Providing students with places to sit—sit and study, sit and talk, sit and ponder changing majors—is a significant function of the modern American student center. Few of these public spaces in Davis are as tightly bound to the University’s past as “Chikago Landing,” a second-floor terrace that overlooks the Olin Atrium. Among the tables and chairs on the landing, one set in particular stands out—a retro-style countertop in a kidney bean shape surrounded by seven vintage stools. “Endowed chairs” of a different sort, the stools were long fixtures in the fabled UVM Carrigan Building Dairy Bar and are now at home in Davis thanks to the sponsorship of a number of donors. Fred “Chico” Lager ’75 helped lead the way on that effort and rallied his longtime circle of UVM friends, the men of “Chikago International,” a self-styled fraternity, to join in. Lager, a top executive with Ben & Jerry’s Homemade for years, and his wife, Yvette Pigeon ’80 G’87 EdD’99, deepened their personal support with a naming gift for the landing. “Of all the things you take away from four years at UVM, by far the most meaningful are the lifelong friendships,” says Lager. As the landing has quickly proven a popular gathering spot for students, a new generation of Chikago-based friendships are, no doubt, being formed at UVM.
Wall of Justice
A large concrete wall at the south end of the Main Street tunnel is among the handful of Davis Center features that remained works-in-progress during the fall semester. Thanks to many students and many gallons of paint, that will soon change. The wall is the future site of a mural inspired by the social justice principals that have guided the Davis Center’s design and operations. On November 5, nearly thirty students gathered in a Davis conference room to hash out concepts for the mural with the help of a woman whose life has been steeped in the power of public art. Daughter of famed muralist Diego Rivera, Guadalupe Rivera Marín visited campus as a guest speaker for Latino Heritage Month, and took time to help the student painters begin to consider the blank wall’s promise. “Public art must be in contact with people,” she said. “It must cause a hard impression on people.” Before the students dispersed into small brainstorming groups, Rivera offered practical tips on materials and stressed the lasting, perhaps daunting legacy of public art. “There is a terrible responsibility in education of the people. Think how many people are going to pass by it and see if you did something well or bad.”
Timely Gift from 2006
Metalworker Steve Conant ’78 has designed and crafted highly public projects from an elegant chandelier in author Edith Wharton’s restored home in Lenox, Massachusetts to period fixtures in the main lobby of Union Station in St. Louis. The call to create a clock for the Dudley H. Davis Center, though, was a commission both public and close to home for Conant and his team at Metal & Light, long a business fixture on Burlington’s Pine Street. The ties were knit even closer by the fact that Steve and Megs (’72) Conant’s daughter Molly was a member of the Class of 2006, who decided to make a Davis Center clock their parting gift to the University. Steve Conant says he began his design work “looking for something that felt modern, but had the rugged aesthetic of something old” and confesses a love for the look of railroad terminal clocks. That industrial aesthetic is evident in the five-foot clock’s structure, but the transparent face with illuminated numerals suggests something more contemporary. Conant is pleased with the result and its display over the building’s central entrance to the Olin Atrium. “It was an honor to be part of the project,” he says.
Shake well
In the pristine Davis Center, Pat Brown is eager to show off a table stained with Magic Markers. Reason enough, the fluorescent rainbow of marker-bleed looks cool. But for Brown, the longtime head of student life who recently added Davis Center director to his title, the real beauty is in all the activities and events posters student groups have created on this table in a cluttered Student Government Association utility room. They represent old-school communication in an Internet Age and testify to the fact that the Davis Center crossroads is the best place to catch the attention of a wide-swath of the student body. An ever-changing gallery of these handmade posters are a fixture along the stairway of the Davis Center’s atrium, not so different from those spray-painted sheets hung by generations of students in front of the bookstore. Brown, whose UVM roots go nearly three decades deep, describes a recent evening when he left a late meeting, found students studying on the fourth floor, an Intervarsity Fellowship meeting in one room, an SGA gathering in another, the sound of a Cat’s Meow rehearsal coming out of a conference room, and so on. “That put a smile on my face,” Brown says. As the student life director stands on a landing of the three-story stairway overlooking the atrium, students pass and there’s a slight tremor. “The engineers tell us it’s supposed to shake,” Brown says. “If it’s not shaking, you should be concerned.” No worries, by the movement-test both staircase and student center seem to be functioning just fine.
Building with a Heart
UVM Student Life staff have worked hard to create a student center that stands for something. Key themes guiding the building’s design and operation include environmental stewardship, social justice, and academic integration. In the daily life of the Davis Center, those abstractions translate into things like a public display of the building’s energy-use vital signs, an exhibit of Robert Shetterly’s “Americans Who Tell The Truth” portraits (including Jody Williams ’72), and getting Horticulture Club students involved with planning and tending the center’s flora.
Photo by Bob Handelman
What to do in Davis
Activate: Student Government Association, WRUV, Cynic, student activities from Hillel to the Ski and Snowboard Club are all headquartered in Davis.
Buy: The UVM Bookstore boasts a level for textbooks and another for trade books, UVM gear, and a café. The student-run Growing Vermont store features local products. Cat Pause convenience covers the daily necessities.
Eat: Main dining area features Sodexho’s Marketplace, Ben and Jerry’s, and New World Tortilla. Brennan’s Pub (yes, you can buy local microbrews and wine, three-drink limit) is one floor down.
Study/Hangout: Lounges aplenty with comfy chairs, wi-fi, and fireplaces. Ascend by floor for more quiet, less socializing, says one student in the know.
Gather: The top floor is the spot with the Grand Maple Ballroom on the east end, the Livak Room with great campus views on the west end, lots of smaller meeting rooms and a fireplace lounge in between.
Some Surprises
The Davis Center is home to three fireplaces; one large fish aquarium, a gift from the Class of 2007; three billiard tables that have proven very popular; and seven stools from UVM’s old Dairy Bar. For alumni who remember the dank tunnel under Main Street, one of the center’s most pleasant surprises is that galvinated-metal culvert’s reincarnation as a warm, well-lit corridor leading into the building’s first floor.
(for UVM staff)