This was part of my “year at work” project, but here of course I’m not the one working—this is a team of guys who were working on one of the many construction projects that are a perpetual part of life on any college campus.
Of those projects, my favorite one to watch in recent years was the construction of the huge new science building called Singer Hall, which included the demolition of two older buildings. The first of those, known as Papazian, had looked from the outside like it was made of gigantic stone blocks, so it was fascinating to see as the hammer came down that the stone was just a facade. The second, Hicks, had a mural that was carefully removed in an intricate operation and then installed in panels up in another building. (I should go up and look at the mural in its new home—I still haven’t.) The most interesting part of the construction was when the big I-beam skeleton of the building had gone up and nothing else—that had a kind of odd beauty to it in and of itself.
Synchronizing pandemic precautions between the rest of the institution and the contractors who employ various construction teams was an especially complicated part of that era; it feels to me a bit as if that has exaggerated or intensified the separation between people doing work on the campus and people who work at the college. One of the things I like about this photo—now more than a decade old—is that it doesn’t have that sense of separation. Right next to these guys having lunch were students and staff having lunch, enjoying the spring day.