Every Campus Has Buildings to Learn From. Here Are Some of the Best.
Every Campus Has Buildings to Learn From. Here Are Some of the Best.
By Lawrence Biemiller
December 11, 2019
Summary
In the hope that they might help you think about news you hear and buildings you see, here are a few of the lessons that campus buildings have taught me over the years.
American college campuses are full of memorable buildings - Jefferson's Rotunda at the U. of Virginia, Charles Z. Klauder's Heinz Chapel at the U. of Pittsburgh, Eero Saarinen's Ingalls Rink at Yale U. You could spend a month listing them and still miss many favorites.
Often the lessons that stick with you and prove useful over the long term come from buildings that aren't campus icons, and campuses that aren't Jefferson's.
Davidson College's twin literary-society buildings, Philanthropic and Eumenean Halls, face each other across one end of the college's small original quadrangle.
In 1985 the Postmodern architect Michael Graves completed renovations to Emory U. originally designed by Henry Hornbostel, the prolific Pittsburgh architect who founded the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon U. The renovations converted what had been a law-school building into anarchaeology museum, and even though it wasn't particularly large, Graves filled it with enough architecture for a museum 10 times its size.
The conclusion's not hard to draw: Know whom you're building for, and build for them.
Princeton U. has so many terrific buildings - William Appleton Potter's Chancellor Green Library, Cope & Stewardson's Blair Hall, Denise Scott Brown's Gordon Wu Hall, Steven Holl's Lewis Center for the Arts, and many more - that choosing the best would be impossible if it weren't for Whig Hall.
The rule for campus buildings ought to be: the more creative, the better.
At the far end of Broad Street I spotted a handsome white building that instinct told me had to be a college.
Reference
Biemiller, L. (2019, December 11). Every Campus Has Buildings to Learn From. Here Are Some of the Best. Retrieved December 13, 2019, from https://www.chronicle.com/article/Every-Campus-Has-Buildings-to/247699.