Bard College Installs New Annandale House Supported by Gift From the George I. Alden Trust

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—Bard College has installed the New Annandale House, a two-story multipurpose media studio building located at the intersection of Woods Avenue and Annandale Road near the center of campus. The 945-square-foot building is made of four 40-by-8-foot Corten steel shipping containers, originally manufactured in Hong Kong in 2003. The building was designed by Maziar Behrooz of MB Architecture in Manhattan and fabricated by SnapSpace Solutions in Brewer, Maine. The ends of the containers were transformed into impressive 8-by-8-foot glass walls. The main floor is a double-height space with an adjoining 20-by-8-foot space. Designed with versatility and flow in mind, the main classroom becomes an indoor/outdoor space with a 16-foot garage door opening onto an adjacent outdoor gathering space on the south side.

“We’re thinking of it as a multiuse collaborative space,” says Dean of Information Services and Director of Libraries Jeff Katz. “It can be a media lab, a demonstration space, a performance space, a gallery space, a video conferencing space, a relaxation and reflection space. We hope the space itself will inspire the community to imagine and propose the ways it might be used.”

The guiding principles of this IT-led initiative were to use repurposed materials to create flexible, practical and elegant multiuse campus space that could, by intention, be used for a variety of short-term purposes. The inaugural residency in New Annandale House will be a workshop, lab, and demonstration space for Bard College Experimental Humanities.


About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, is an independent, residential, coeducational college offering a four-year B.A. program in the liberal arts and sciences and a five-year B.A./B.S. degree in economics and finance. The Bard College Conservatory of Music offers a five-year program in which students pursue a dual degree—a B.Music and a B.A. in a field other than music. Bard offers M.Music degrees in conjunction with the Conservatory and The Orchestra Now, and at Longy School of Music of Bard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bard and its affiliated institutions also grant the following degrees: A.A. at Bard High School Early College, a public school with campuses in New York City, Cleveland, Baltimore, and Newark, New Jersey; A.A. and B.A. at Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and through the Bard Prison Initiative at six correctional institutions in New York State; M.A. in curatorial studies, M.S. in economic theory and policy, and M.S. in environmental policy and in climate science and policy at the Annandale campus; M.F.A. and M.A.T. at multiple campuses; M.B.A. in sustainability in New York City; and M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in the decorative arts, design history, and material culture at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan. Internationally, Bard confers dual B.A. and M.A. degrees at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State University, Russia (Smolny College); dual B.A. and M.A.T. degrees at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem; and dual B.A. degrees at American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan and Bard College Berlin: A Liberal Arts University.

Bard offers nearly 50 academic programs in four divisions. Total enrollment for Bard College and its affiliates is approximately 5,500 students. The undergraduate College has an enrollment of more than 1,900 and a student-to-faculty ratio of 10:1. In 2016, Bard acquired the Montgomery Place estate, bringing the size of the campus to nearly 1,000 acres. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.

This event was last updated on 10-30-2019

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