Site overview
The Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine, is an integrated complex of wooden buildings designed by New York architect Edward Larrabee Barnes, starting in 1959. The complex, which contains craft studios, bunkhouses, administration buildings, and a dining facility, is simultaneously cleaved to and floats above a steep hillside overlooking Jericho Bay and the Deer Isle Thorofare. The campus, which references local traditions of vernacular architecture all the while creating a sculptural form that is an inspired illustration of architecture as craft, was recognized as an outstanding example of Modernist architecture by the American Institute of Architects in 1994 with the presentation of their Twenty-Five-Year Award. Described as a property that, in only three decades, "has acquired the status of a New England classic," the Haystack Campus is heralded as among Barnes’ greatest achievements.