Bowdoin College | Mills Hall & Gibbons Center for Arctic Studies

A Catalyst for Research & Dialogue

This pair of new buildings provides a new home for Bowdoin’s storied Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum, a new event space, and state-of-the-art educational facilities.

Although distinct in both program and appearance, the two buildings function as a pair with steeply pitched rooflines that play off each other from different vantage points, while sharing a consistent timber structural expression throughout the interiors. The first commercially scaled mass timber buildings in the state of Maine, both buildings take advantage of their vaulted timber structure to create distinctive spaces activated by tall windows and skylights. Together, these buildings form a new campus gateway from the north, while helping provide definition and a sense of place to the Dudley Coe Quad.

Mills Hall is a 30,000 SF academic building that includes classrooms, faculty offices, a cinema, and campus event space. Wrapping an existing grove of mature pines, the chevron shaped 2-story building is dressed in a familiar campus palette of red brick and copper with a rhythm of tall windows.

Clad in rustic black masonry, the more introverted Gibbons Center for Arctic Studies is a 16,500 SF research center that houses the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum along with an archeology lab, teaching classrooms, collections storage, and offices for staff and faculty.

Minimizing the Center’s carbon footprint was an important driver in the building’s design and program’s messaging. HGA’s integrated, interdisciplinary design team leveraged multiple building systems, including the use of mass timber structural framing and careful mechanical system design, to achieve the College’s desire to have the museum contribute to a “fossil-fuel free” narrative while meeting museum-level temperature and humidity requirements.