University unveils plans for quilt center
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BY MATTHEW HANSEN / Lincoln Journal Star
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has unveiled plans for a $10.5 million East Campus museum.
Fittingly, it looks a little like a quilt.
The university's 8-year-old International Quilt Study Center, the first of its kind, will move into a headquarters that's similarly unique, university officials said before unveiling the design Wednesday afternoon.
Robert A.M. Stern Architects of New York will design the 30,000-square-foot building — a combination museum, gallery, classroom and climate-controlled quilt storage facility. The company beat out proposals from more than 100 other firms.
The winning design's glass panel facade looks stitched together, said Patricia Crews, the quilt center's director. And its design features three quiltlike layers that will house the largest public quilt collection in the world when it opens its doors in fall 2007 at 33rd and Holdrege streets.
"We hope the public is intrigued by what they see on the outside," Crews said. "We hope it makes them want to come inside and explore."
The new center and the university's interest in quilting for the past decade largely can be attributed to Ardis and Robert James, a New York couple who spent a lifetime amassing one of the world's biggest private collections and then donated more than 900 quilts worth nearly $9 million to UNL.
That gift prompted the university to create the International Quilt Study Center in 1997, locating it on the second floor of the Home Economics Building.
About 8,000 quilt enthusiasts have examined the collection at its current home, and tens of thousands more have glanced at UNL-owned quilts at exhibitions held all over campus, Crews said.
That public interest and the university's ever-growing quilt collection made the Home Economics Building headquarters seem smaller and smaller as the years passed.
And so the Jameses re-entered the picture, ponying up an unspecified but sizable donation for the architect search and a larger donation to help build the new center.
The University of Nebraska Foundation still must raise half of the $10.5 million it will take to build the architect's design while using no university or state money.
When the center is finished, the new building likely will draw scholars, quilt fanatics and passers-by who simply want to check it out, Crews said.
Stern Architects has designed high-profile buildings for the Walt Disney Co. and Harvard and Stanford universities.
The New York firm's latest building will serve as an East Campus version of Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, according to UNL Chancellor Harvey Perlman.
"The Sheldon is among the most important architectural gems in the region, and the quilt center and museum promises to continue the tradition of placing architecturally important buildings on university campuses to house meaningful programs," Perlman said.
Not everyone agrees that a quilt center and the related UNL textile history graduate program mean much to the university.
Randy Ferlic, a University of Nebraska regent from Omaha, often has joked that UNL is the only university in the country that has a golf major and a quilting minor.
The university started a golf management major last year and has offered an emphasis in quilt studies since 1997.
Regent Drew Miller of Papillion has questioned whether the university really needed a quilt center or textile program at all.
"I would be very, very hard-pressed to name one program less important to education and less important to the state of Nebraska than quilts," he said during September's board meeting.
The center's value comes from the fact that quilts are a link to the country's working-class past, Crews said.
It's a link historians understand better than ever as they focus more on the lives of average Americans and less on the lives of the rich and famous, she said.
It's a link that a new generation is discovering as they put down their cell phones and laptops and pick up a quilting needle.
"It's the most democratic of creative pursuits," Crews said. "You just need a needle, a thread and a few pieces of fabric."
Reach Matthew Hansen at 473-7245 or mhansen@journalstar.com.
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