Field, House

The beams from the east arrive most mornings at Thompson Field House, carving light and shadow into secret, fleeting architecture. As the “giver of all presences,” the interplay of light begins just after sunup, when the long column windows facing the fields refract into golden portal doors that span the court’s fish-net scrim, landing finally in translucence along the gymnasium’s tall “EXETER” wall.

Here, beyond the more constant, girder logic of physics, the fact of gravity, and the function of cement and stone, lies another gift, one that the architects must have anticipated, as they accounted for the layers of purpose in this space: one that marks the morning’s natural arc of time and path, pattern and pace, light and shadow.

And on this one morning, it’s just past six, and soon the overhead fluorescence will cast its film onto the quiet, constant geometry of the crimson track that measures pace in meters. By then, the sun will have landed its golden gaze elsewhere and the space will teem with relay runners and catchers, rowers and cross-train-ers, dashers and hurdlers. Later it will lure Academy families with wobbling tots drawn to the long-jump sand pit, to the stretch of red that lets them run and run and run until naptime, until the big kids come for their splits and drills.

But now, in the morning quiet, a solitary runner lopes along the ovular path, observing the cathedral-height walls, the exposed rafters and impossibly gleaming windows, the pairs of slanted support beams that offer the unmistakable mark of masons: the sacred tools of learning and precision. And then she spots a neon ball beneath a bleacher, a spin-dly shadow cast by a pair of chairs near the tennis court. She notices how each edge of sand in the jump pit ripples liquid-like in shadow, how the layers of netted scrim lend an echo to a Louise Bourgeois creation. There’s possibility in this space. And then, as the last compass and ruler are everywhere, in fast-fading scalene crosshatch of morning light sprawls a butterscotch pattern across the tennis court, evidence of and oblong, as the shadow and light fade, inevitably, into one.

Erica Plouffe Lazure came to Exeter as the Bennett Fellow in 2009 and has taught English at the Academy since 2010. She is the author of a short story collection, Proof of Me and Other Stories. Her faculty reflection was originally published in the fall 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.