This week was quite an exciting whirlwind of celebratory events for the opening of RISD’s much-anticipated Chace Center, designed by award-winning architect Jose Rafael Moneo. Robert Campbell’s Boston Globe piece said it best with:

Good-looking as the outside is, the real success of Chace is the way it pulls the campus together… Chace becomes the common ground of a multifarious campus. It builds physical connections with everything around it.

It all kicked-off on Wednesday with a day-long open house for RISD faculty, students and staff on Wednesday. Celebrations continued through the weekend, with the official public opening on Saturday morning. The brass band and blazing tubas echoed the jubilant feelings of the RISD community, Providence, and the Board of Trustees, who were in town to mark the occasion. Despite the rain, the Museum got the most visitors its ever had in a single day.

The Chace Center is the one place on campus where everything we do at RISD comes together. In addition to offering our city and state a fine example of world-class architecture-thinking, the Chace Center will do remarkable things for RISD and our community. We’ll come together to enjoy lectures, performances and other programming in the Metcalf Auditorium; we’ll appreciate the many outcomes of a RISD education while browsing at risd|works; students will share their work with each other and the public in the beautiful new Gelman and Student Media galleries; the Museum will feature special exhibitions in its spacious new gallery; the entire community will take advantage of the amazing resources in the Minskoff Center for Prints, Drawings, and Photographs; and finally, several sections of lucky freshmen will explore two-dimensional design in the Foundation Studies studios on the top floor, with some of the best views in town.

Thanks again to all of the donors, staff, and everyone who poured their heart and soul into this project for the past 10 years. It shows.