Rear facade looking over Murbach Field and Gibbett Hill

This rendering dramatizes things that can’t happen today but that we dream for in the future: an access point into the heart of campus, a place for day students to enter at the beginning of the day and exit at the end of the day, and an interior place of meeting and gathering at all hours of the day and week for boarders. Instead of parking and asphalt, we will create an architectural statement of belonging: You are warmly welcome at Lawrence Academy. Here, the light shines for all. Here, we are built on the Happiness of Community.

Intimately connected to the dining hall and servery below (as well as meeting rooms on the other side), the built-in student center acts as a family room, a hub of activity at all times of the day and week. Whether a day student chooses to wait for a ride, a boarder lounges with friends over a quiet long weekend, or a mixed group of students (and maybe even parents) warms up between halves of a game in the spring or fall, the place to be is under this roof, never losing sight of the view!

As noted in the opening letter of this Journal, this will be a building project greater in scope than any other in the history of Lawrence Academy — both in square footage and in fundraising. Understanding the importance of this investment for LA at this critical time, we have been working with determination and ambition to raise the necessary funds to authorize construction and fund the project as a whole.

Providing this exceptional experience to our students will require approximately $20 million in contributions. We can authorize construction once we reach $16 million, or 80 percent of our goal. Our plans and systems are ready architecturally and operationally, and our generous community has already provided great momentum with almost $11 million in gifts and pledges to date. We are already over halfway along! These coming months will be critical as we seek an additional $10 million in contributions toward this project.

We are very fortunate to have a matching gift in place that is providing a 15 percent match on new monies raised — up to $2 million of additional matching funding. We look to inspire many others to join the cause just as the community has come together in the past to build Lawrence Academy. You can see in the accompanying image how our original “subscribers” from 1792 came together to make vision reality. Perhaps the currencies have changed, but the founding vision has not.

We are so grateful to all of those who have committed their support to helping make this project a reality — a reality built into LA’s mission, its motto, and its very foundation — an academy built on the proposition that “the Happiness of Community requires the dissemination of knowledge and learning amongst all classes of citizens.” As Dan Chambliss said, “The great thing about creating good buildings is they last. And if a building works well the users of it develop an attachment to that space.” We believe the impact of this building will transform and connect Lawrence Academy in lasting and inspiring ways that many generations will feel.

From Head of School Dan Scheibe P’23, ’24