Maryette Haggerty-Perrault

= Division III =

This article is part of a Climax Div III Issue. By Eric Peterson, Staff Writer.

You could say Maryette Haggerty-Perrault came to Hampshire for its really great sports program. “I thought the Div III at Hampshire was NCAA Division III sports… that’s how I initially came across the college, I wanted to play college volleyball and swim.” You can blame Google for that. Haggerty always thought she would transfer but, now upon finishing her Division III, said, “I’ve have come to realize that I was meant to be here for some as-of-yet undiscovered reason, but I’ve certainly been able to take advantage of learning opportunities that I never would have had elsewhere.”

Among them were the semester she spent in Cuba working with the city planning office of Havana, getting trained in Autocad at The New York Institute for Architecture &amp; Urban Design, and spending her final year working on comprehensive redesigns of the Ford Foundaton Building in New York and the Hampshire campus’s own Longsworth Arts Village. Undoubtedly, if you’ve ever walked through the later, you know it certainly needs redesigning: “My ultimate goal for the site was to put the space to good use: improve conditions of the site, thus increasing community usage; allow for more interaction between the arts housed in the Village, by bringing the program of the building interiors outside as well as creating an outdoor classroom &amp; precedent for a minimal impact, low cost eco-friendly redesign.”

By creating outdoor spaces for the arts contained in the individual buildings, as well as upgrading the roof canopy overhead (a flat room which, forever the butt of the most infamous of modern architecture’s criticism, is always leaking) she united her interests in engineering and the social uses of outdoor spaces.

Maryette heads off this summer to do a fellowship at the National Institute of Standards &amp; Technology but leaves Hampshire students with this parting advice: “I’d say that taking advantage of Hampshire’s unique learning experiences (and exchange programs in particular) is the best thing you can do.” “I guess I’ve finally stepped up to the ‘make your education your own’ challenge,” she almost begrudgingly admits.