Bar Harbor is the busiest venue on Maine’s idyllic Mount Desert Island, known for its 31,000-acre Acadia National Park and for the island’s history as a summer colony for the Rockefellers, Astors, and Vanderbilts. While the village of Bar Harbor teems in the summer with tourists crowding T-shirt shops and ice cream parlors, calmer enclaves exist outside the village, such as the 38-acre College of the Atlantic on Frenchman Bay. For this small private undergraduate institution, Susan T. Rodriguez | Architecture • Design of New York collaborated with OPAL Architecture of Belfast, Maine, to create a crisply tailored, sustainable, 28,000-square-foot, two-story classroom building. The polished result, dedicated in September, meets remarkably high standards of sustainability with a design distinction often missing in energy-efficient efforts.
The College of the Atlantic Davis Center for Human Ecology is highlighted in the annual colleges and universities issue of Architectural Record, alongside six other innovative designs from around the world.
