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Sweet Briar’s intellectually and socially vibrant campus is a true community, home not only to students but also many members of our faculty and staff. It is a living laboratory that provides hands-on opportunities for exploration and discovery in nearly every discipline, from the arts and humanities to the sciences and engineering.
History, arts management and environmental science students have a particularly rich setting in which to do research. The campus was a working plantation in the 18th and 19th centuries and the founding family left a vast collection of artifacts. Across campus, research sites include old-growth forests, experimental biofuel plots and weather stations where instrumentation collects data on the atmosphere. The main campus buildings lie at the center of 3,250 acres of rolling hills, woods and meadows in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. The broad landscape includes two lakes, eight nature sanctuaries and protected areas as well as an extensive network of walking, horseback riding and hiking trails.
The campus, designed in the early part of the 20th century, is dominated by the architecture of Ralph Adams Cram, whose work is also seen at MIT, Princeton, Wellesley, Rice and West Point. Twenty-one of Sweet Briar’s buildings are on the National Register of Historic Places and these historic buildings are home to impressive academic facilities. Our science laboratories contain some of the best instrumentation in the nation for liberal arts colleges.
Mary Helen Cochran Library is the cornerstone of the College’s academic community. In 2014, a restoration project on the historic 1929 building was completed; 16,000 square feet of study, classroom and collaborative spaces were added. This state-of-the-art facility is one of the finest private college libraries in Virginia. Its collection includes a broad selection of volumes plus subscriptions to physical and digital periodicals and audiovisual materials, as well as access to online academic databases and e-book and video collections through the library website. The library’s interlibrary loan and cooperative borrowing programs allow students, faculty and staff to borrow materials from other libraries across the state of Virginia and the United States.
In 2009, the College renovated its gym, creating the 53,000-square-foot Fitness and Athletics Center. Green Village, which provides furnished apartment-style living on campus for up to 60 students, was completed that same year.
The 526-seat Murchison Lane Auditorium in Babcock Fine Arts Center is host to cultural and intellectual events from student dance and theater productions to world-renowned speakers and the Babcock Season, which brings visiting performing artists, theater troops and music ensembles to campus.
Rotating art exhibitions are research-, studio- and community-based and are presented in one of three galleries: Babcock, Benedict and Pannell; the latter houses the Sweet Briar Collection.
Located in the Boxwood Alumnae House, the Sweet Briar Museum contains excellent teaching collection of 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century American decorative arts, including artifacts of the College’s founders and memorabilia from throughout the College’s history.
The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), the only artists’ retreat in the nation with direct ties to a college or university, is adjacent to the Sweet Briar campus. Writers, visual artists and composers working at the VCCA come to the College to take part in campus life.
The Florence Elston Inn & Conference Center complex, located on campus, provides a fully equipped 10,000-square-foot conference facility and an inn featuring 38 rooms.
The College is centrally located within the state of Virginia, 54 miles south of Charlottesville and 168 miles southwest of Washington, D.C., on U.S. 29.
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