Thirty years after it was built (in 1972), Smith College’s fine arts center was “uninhabitable.” Why did this relatively new building fail to hold up while Smith’s other buildings are doing fine after a century? “Before the era of the modern movement, buildings were built in predictable and conventional ways. Builders knew how to build in that manner. Architects didn’t ask them to do anything else. But with the arrival of modernism, architects began to invent new kinds of construction. They experimented. A gap opened between the traditional builder and the modernist architect. No longer could the builder correct the architect’s mistakes. What happened to Andrews’s building is only too typical.”