Centering Community

Why does Lawrence Academy need a nice, new dining hall with a student center right in the middle of campus right now? In addition to the visual case made by the renderings presented later in this Academy Journal, here are a couple of answers from the past that look to the future.

The first buildings and grounds effort of Lawrence Academy, dating to 1792, was to purchase some land (only about an acre, in the northwestern corner of our present +/- 150 acres) and then to build a schoolhouse on it. The area needed a place of learning, and the school’s founders materialized it.

Later in the 1850s, on a campus that had grown modestly over the decades from its original footprint, the school decided it needed boarding space for students. Though the Academy had acquired several buildings adjacent to the first Schoolhouse, it had never taken on another major building project. The construction of Bigelow Hall committed to the fullest sense of campus: a place to both live and learn.

Over the decades and centuries since, Lawrence Academy has continued, deliberately, to grow and build, claiming its gracious space in town atop its hillside: centered on the Quad, flowing to the fields to the east and west below. As time and space would have it, the crest and center of the campus (in fact, a division between watersheds) is located somewhere right near the doors of the Gray Building — where this photo with the 2022-2023 Cabinet was taken. Here we will re-center our community and renew the vows our founders made. The Community Commons creates a meeting point between the functional parts of LA: athletics, academics, arts, advisory, and the day and boarding experiences — ALL of it. In the language of our architects, it connects the centrality of the Quad to the landscape beyond while connecting people to each other. It is the place of belonging where we will live our mission: recognizing you while empowering you to look beyond.

The Commons, above all, will reinforce “The Happiness of Community,” which our founders believed would underly “the dissemination of knowledge and learning amongst all classes of citizens.” While we do want to build an extraordinary (perhaps THE MOST extraordinary) dining and student life experience in independent schools, what we really want to do is provide a space for LA to be LA at its very best: shining for all.

Representing the most significant investment in the school’s physical plant in LA history, the Community Commons builds and strengthens community by design, uniting day students and boarders, exponentially increasing personal interaction and facilitating constant student-faculty connection. We are investing in the principle that personal connection (“The Happiness of Community”) makes great education.

The Community Commons will be our generation’s contribution to the phenomenal educational landscape that is Lawrence Academy. On this point it is apt to recognize Ben Williams, who passed away right at the beginning of Winterim and while this opening was being written (See tributes on the following pages). Ben identified with the LA environment in ways no other person has: “my kind of territory,” in his words. Ben was himself a centering force on the LA campus and in the LA experience during his distinguished watch. With Ben as a generous example, we acknowledge centuries of watchful custodians and engineers of our shared hillside “territory.”

It is time for us to do our part. We will bring foresight and wise planning into the process of designing the student experience, as Ben did. When we finish construction of the Community Commons, I will imagine — rightly, I believe — our founders, Ben, and generations of students and faculty smiling. Smiling because we got it right, grounding and elevating ourselves just from this spot amongst the hills of Groton.