The New England chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art announced Harrison Design was awarded a 2022 Bulfinch Award in Ecclesiastic design for its renovation of Thomas Aquinas College’s Our Mother of Perpetual Help Chapel in Northfield, Mass. The project was led by the firm’s Sacred Studio, based in Washington., D.C., in collaboration with its Santa Barbara office. The award will be formally received on October 29 at the Harvard Club in Boston. 

The original chapel, which was part of the bucolic campus of the Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies, was built in 1909 in a neo-Gothic idiom. The school consolidated with its men’s college and abandoned the campus in 2005; subsequently Thomas Aquinas College acquired the property in 2019.

The interior was transformed to represent the Roman Catholic liturgy, with new sanctuary and sacristy millwork, statuary and furnishings, and an updated pew layout. The renovation took cues from the existing neo-Gothic structure, spurring a deep study of the Gothic language from its native France and England.