FRANCES DALY FERGUSSON
2006 HONOREE
The Stewardship of Modernism
When Frances Daly Fergusson became president of Vassar College in 1986, she found a campus that, although innately beautiful, had not been carefully tended. "I felt it was very much a 'fixer-upper,'" she said. Still, Fergusson, a Harvard-trained architectural historian, saw past the unclipped hedges, loose bricks, and chipped paint to the Vassar that had once been and could still be. "I realized that it had great bones," she said.
Indeed it did. Vassar's exquisite one-thousand-acre campus of green lawns, flowering gardens, a golf course, lakes, meadows, and woodlands is an arboretum of rare plants and trees. But it is also, as Fergusson put it, "an arboretum of architecture" with important buildings dating back to 1865 when James Renwick, architect of the Smithsonian, designed Main Building. The campus also had-a legacy from forward-thinking president Sarah Gibson Blanding-several mid-century modern buildings of considerable significance.
Fergusson stepped down from the Vassar presidency in 2006 after two decades, a tenure marked by a profound commitment to architecture and landscape design, including restoration of sadly deteriorated modernist buildings.
First among these was Emma Hartman Noyes House (1958), a dormitory designed by Eero Saarinen. Fergusson sought out Minneapolis architect Leonard Parker, who worked with Saarinen and was project manager for Noyes, to return the building's drab and tattered public spaces to near-original condition, most particularly the famed "conversation pit" with its Tulip and Womb chairs upholstered in orange, mauve, and green. "He did it as literally as he could," said Fergusson.
More challenging was restoration of Marcel Breuer's Ferry House (1951) where bedrooms cantilevered out into the treetops above ground floor living areas. Breuer's longtime partner, Herbert Beckhard, who had joined Breuer in 1954, was chosen for this restoration. Beckhard completed aspects of Breuer's original plan eliminated originally due to cost constraints, such as adding in diagonal wooden ceilings and replacing outdated radiant heating with Runtal radiators still being made in "Breuer blue." Furniture was either rebuilt or newly built as closely as possible to Breuer's designs. "It is not an absolute, prayerful restoration," said Fergusson.
Other restorations of Vassar's modernist buildings are still under way, notably the 1937 Art Library by John McAndrew and Chicago Hall by Robert Paul Schweikher. In two decades as Vassar president, Fergusson also transformed Vassar's campus, replanting gardens where there had been unwelcome incursions of macadam, cultivating the horticulture, highlighting the landscape.
Fergusson holds a BA from Wellesley College and a PhD in art and architectural history from Harvard. She worked at Newton College (now part of Boston College), the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and Bucknell University, where she was provost and vice-president for academic affairs. She serves on the board of overseers at Harvard and is a director of the National Humanities Council, Isamu Noguchi Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Mattel Inc., Second Stage Theatre, and the Foreign Policy Association. She has been a trustee of the Ford Foundation, the Mayo Foundation, and Historic Hudson among many other appointments. Fergusson is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received honorary degrees from Bard College, the University of London and the University of Hartford. In 1998, she received the Eleanor Roosevelt at Val-Kill Award for Humanitarian Service.