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FAILING FAYERWEATHER FACILITIES IMPAIR STUDENT WORK by Katherine Johnson
Have you ever spent a couple hours working on a project for class and come out feeling like you just sniffed glue for an hour? Or tried to go to your class only to find out the building had been shut down by the EPA? Has your class ever been cut short because the teacher was feeling faint from lingering fumes? For most people these conditions are what you would expect if you attended classes in, say, Ghana. If you are a studio art major at the University of Virginia, however, you probably answered yes to all of the above. Maybe that's because the building which houses U.Va.'s art studio is over one hundred years old, and has not been sufficiently renovated since it was originally built as a gymnasium in 1893.
If you are a sociology major you enjoy breezy Cabell Hall rooms in which the only fume you might encounter would be from the Greenberry's coffee someone spilled on the floor. Comm school career-mongers relax every day with their laptops in a squeaky-new, climate-controlled building. Even chemistry majors, who spend hours on end in a lab filled with toxic chemicals, come out with as many brain cells as they go in with because they have a well-ventilated, spacious facility. For studio art majors, on the other hand, it's an adventure every time they set foot in the archaic building known as Fayerweather Hall. When Fayer-weather was initially built as the university's gym, it was touted as "the largest and most complete gymnasium in South." Today, Fayerweather is much the same as it was a hundred years ago; in other words, it was never adequately adapted to being a studio art facility. While it may have been a state-of-the-art facility in the nineteenth century, it is in no state for art today. "The building is
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