The Black Mountain College Studies Building has been named one of only ten sites nationwide to World Monuments Fund's new Irreplaceable America list.
The recognition, launched in honor of the America's 250th anniversary, spotlights heritage places that capture the full breadth of the American story. The Studies Building, tucked into the Lake Eden campus in Black Mountain, joins nine other sites across the country, from New York's Smallpox Hospital Ruin to the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, chosen from 75 nationwide nominations.
What is Black Mountain College, and why does this building matter?
Founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, and a handful of colleagues who had just been dismissed from Rollins College in Florida for their progressive views, Black Mountain College was built as a rebellion against the hierarchical, lecture-and-test model of higher education. Rice drew heavily on the educational philosophy of John Dewey, who visited the college several times during its early years and strongly influenced its approach to teaching. Dewey's vision called for students to help shape their own educations and participate directly in running the school, rather than sitting as passive recipients of a fixed curriculum.
At Black Mountain, that meant art, music, and drama held the same academic weight as math or literature, and running the physical campus, farming, cooking, building, and maintaining it, was treated as part of the education itself. The college had no set requirements, no grades in the traditional sense, and administration was handled largely by faculty and students rather than a traditional administrative hierarchy. Students and teachers lived, worked, and studied side by side, which is precisely why they built the Studies Building with their own hands rather than hiring it out.
Later in 1933, Bauhaus artists Josef and Anni Albers joined the faculty after fleeing Nazi Germany, where the Third Reich had shut down the original Bauhaus school. Their arrival turned Black Mountain into a landing place for European modernism at exactly the moment it was being driven out of Europe, and it set the tone for three decades in which the college would function less like a traditional school and more like a working laboratory for American art.
By 1940, that philosophy needed a permanent home. Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, two of modernism's leading architects, drew the original plans for the Studies Building, but when funding fell short, architect A. Lawrence Kocher simplified the design into something the college could actually build.
Between 1940 and 1942, students, faculty, and staff raised the building themselves, using local materials and the kind of wartime ingenuity that turns limitation into invention. The result is a distinctly American strain of modernism, grounded in pragmatism and collaboration rather than polish.
Today, the Studies Building is the only major purpose-built academic building from Black Mountain College's Lake Eden campus to survive largely intact, making it one of the most significant physical reminders of the college's groundbreaking educational experiment and a central focus of ongoing preservation efforts.
Who passed through these walls?
The list of names connected to Black Mountain College reads like a syllabus for twentieth-century American art. Robert Rauschenberg, Buckminster Fuller, Jacob Lawrence, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Jean Charlot all spent time here, alongside countless others who helped shape postwar art and literature. Black Mountain College also offered unusually significant opportunities for women artists to study, teach, and shape modern art at a time when many institutions did not, with students including Ruth Asawa, Dorothea Rockburne, Susan Weil, and Elaine de Kooning.
What condition is the building in now?
Time and weather have not been kind. Severe deterioration, water infiltration, and climate-related damage now threaten the structure's survival. The Black Mountain College Studies Building Foundation is working to restore and adaptively reuse the space, to turn it back into a working center for artistic production, education, and public engagement.
Matthew Crawford, Chairman of the Board of the Black Mountain College Studies Building Foundation, called the recognition an honor and a reminder that the building deserves to be restored and maintained for future generations.
What does this recognition mean for the site?
Selection for Irreplaceable America brings national and local media attention timed to the country's semiquincentennial, a spotlight in WMF's digital and printed materials, a year of strategic consultation with WMF's heritage experts, and the chance to develop preservation projects in partnership with the organization. For a campus built on the idea that art and community are inseparable, that kind of support could be the difference between a building that continues to decay and one that gets to teach again.
Can I visit?
Yes. The Studies Building sits on the Lake Eden campus, now home to Camp Rockmont, a summer camp that leases the land for part of the year. The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center partners with Lake Eden Preserve to run guided two-hour walking tours in spring and fall, covering the Studies Building along with the historic Dining Hall, Lodges, and Quiet House, plus the Jean Charlot frescoes painted by students in 1944. Tours are not offered in summer while camp is in session, and BMCM+AC cannot accommodate private or off-schedule visits, so plan around the published tour dates.
Once restoration is complete, the foundation plans to reopen the building for artist residencies, public tours, exhibitions, and seminars for most of the year, while Camp Rockmont continues to use it each summer. In the meantime, those interested in the history and preservation effort can also visit the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in downtown Asheville, or learn more directly from the Black Mountain College Studies Building Foundation.
For a livelier way in, look for {Re}HAPPENING, an annual one-day event held right on the Lake Eden campus. Part art event, part fundraiser, part community instigator, it invites contemporary artists to respond to Black Mountain College's legacy by activating the campus grounds and surrounding buildings with installations, new media, music, and performance projects. The fragile Studies Building itself mostly serves as backdrop rather than venue, its facade has hosted projected art in past years, while the fields around it fill with the kind of experimental, collaborative work the college was known for.
Learn more: bmcsb.org
All photos courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina.