History
The Davis Museum became the fourth home of Wellesley College’s collection of artwork upon its opening in October 1993. This new building allowed for the display of both the permanent collections and special exhibitions and was created through numerous donations, most notably Wellesley alumna, Kathryn Wasserman Davis '28, and her husband, Shelby Cullum Davis. The Davis’s 25 galleries display Wellesley College’s encyclopedic permanent collections and special exhibitions. Both the Davis Museum and Collins Cinema were designed by the Spanish architect José Rafael Moneo.
Architecture
Rafael Moneo designed the four-story, 61,000 square foot Davis Museum to complement the College’s natural landscape and Paul Rudolph's Jewett Arts Center. Moneo emphasized the importance of site-appropriate architecture, and continued the dialogue between the landscape and other buildings on campus with the Davis’s plan and exterior. While the Davis’s architecture converses with the existing collegiate Gothic buildings on campus and the Frederick Law Olmsted-inspired late 19th-century campus landscape, its relationship with Paul Rudolph’s Jewetts Arts Center is most striking. Moneo pays homage to Rudolph through his application of an austere facade, half-columns in the lobby, geometric shapes, red brick, and sandblasted concrete.
José Rafael Moneo
Recipient of both the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize and the International Union of Architects Gold Medal, José Rafael Moneo is a professor, theoretician, and an architect based in Madrid. He is the former chair of the Department of Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design and proposed a cutting-edge design for the Davis Museum, Wellesley College’s first, fully-dedicated museum building and his first North American commission. Moneo has designed office buildings, railway stations, banks, and other museums—most notably the Modern Museum and Swedish Museum of Architecture, Stockholm, Sweden (1998) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2000).
