I think that new neo-gothic campus building looks fantastic. I think it is much bolder to build something like this, than it is to build yet another swoopy glass and steel "contemporary" building, which is the norm for any institutions without any self-confidence.
Also, those buildings will age gracefully and never look stupid. We know this because there are thousands of similar buildings, from the middle ages to the revivals in the 1800s and 1900s that still don't look stupid after multiple centuries.
Also, those buildings will age gracefully and never look stupid.
Ezra and Morse have also aged well, neither "looks stupid", and both were modern when built.
Anyway, the new colleges are certainly beautiful. I'm sure they will age well. But, it is slightly disappointing that few architectural/stylistic risks were taken in the design.
do they 'not look stupid' because they have been around such a long time that they have trained our sense of what we consider a beautiful timeless building to be _or_ are they actually beautiful timeless buildings?
In another 1000 year would steel "contemporary" buildings be considered beautiful or not? Is beauty a requirement for a institution? Do you want a building to be beautiful or functional? Who gets to decide what is beautiful?
Beauty is one of the functions of a building. Pursuing "form over function" without considering beauty leaves you with a shantytown.
>Who gets to decide what is beautiful?
If one of the goals of a building is for people to visit it and to spend time around it and to enjoy the experience, then the community of people who will have to live with the building should have the most say about what is beautiful for them. One issue with some architects is that they don't have "skin in the game" when it comes to the buildings they design. They can come up with interesting concepts and visions that may seem appealing as a model or impressive to their peers, but if they don't have to walk by it every single day, then their opinions about what is beautiful should not be a dominating and overriding factor.
In the specific case of university donors, they have a particular vision for what the aesthetics should be, and it's their support that makes the university continue to run well and it's their personal connection to the university that makes them care. Their objectives of beauty should be more important in that particular case than a designer who will be moving on to the next project.
Have been trying to "get" a lot of modern architecture since I studied it back in the day, but much of it from the 70's on looks dated to me. Buildings like I.M. Pei's Dallas City Hall. Have to look hard to find a Guggenheim, which (IMO) has stood the test of time.
So "modern" and functionalism is great, but I'd rather they figure out something lasting before they experiment with a few $100M of my taxes/tuition/donation.
I'd say they are actually timeless, it isn't just emotional attachment. They're both beautiful and functional. Some of those old buildings are less functional than they used to, like a lot of churches in Europe, but they are redeemed because they are beautiful.
> Is beauty a requirement for a institution?
It certainly is if those institutions recognize their responsibility when building large projects. Good architecture should be beautiful, robust, and useful. That's a rule of thumb dating back to antiquity. Modernist ideology started to subvert two of those, and really only focused on use. It bastardized beauty into branding, the idea that a building is a sculpture that needs to project the brand of the institution. That's why so called "forward thinking" institutions build buildings that look futuristic. But they only look futuristic in the present-day, that kick wears off really quick. What remains is often objectively horrible and unpleasant. That new Yale building will not suffer that fate, because Yale didn't fall in that trap of using architecture as branding.
I have a problem with the redeeming qualities of a old building. Sure, it's pleasant to look at, it may even improve your mood, but is this why you're there? Example: you need to study in the library and the library is really small because it was super expensive to build and noone thought we would have so many students. And by the way, the heating does not work or it's expensive as fuck. Now what?
I've been in a lot of garish, modern/brutal and cold libraries. Some with A/C that actually worked but was always out of control - for whatever reason, a lot of very "modern" buildings have crazy bad HVAC. Either too much or too litle.
Of course that can be fixed, but why not something like an updated version of the latter library?
If we’re going to talk “timeless” I might recommend a read through Chris Alexander’s “A Timeless Way of Building” and its follow-up, “A Pattern Language”.
Alexander talks about the timelessness and beauty of buildings in terms of culturally-defined patterns—almost ‘design patterns’ but a bit more abstract—that are applied and repeated to create buildings and spaces that evoke a particular “feeling without a name”: something we all feel when a building feels alive and congruous with the actions that take place there. A beautiful building is symbiotic with its purpose, its surroundings, and the people who use it.
That’s sort of a gross oversimplification though. I really recommend checking it out. Though its focus is loosely on architecture, I’ve seen a lot of engineers and designers get excited about it and find applications to their own work.
Do you want a building to be beautiful or functional?
Seems like a false dichotomy to me.
I mean, you can choose which elements of old buildings to copy and which not to copy; you can copy brickwork, window design and courtyard layouts without copying poor disabled access, ineffective climate control or impractical staircase layout.
is it? I'm not saying you need one or the other.
I'm saying that it's a spectrum and you have to chose what you optimize for.
The most functional building is not going to be the most beautiful one and vice-versa.
That is why one should hire a great architect. To try and get as much as possible of both with a given location and budget. With a bad one you can easliy get neither. See sites on bad McMansions.
Agree. And you can definitely get some of both. My original badly made point was that you cannot prioritize form over function and get away with it. Now that I think about it I guess the reverse is true (ie you cannot prioritize function over form and call it a day).
I would argue beauty and function aren't actually completely separate things, especially in educational institutions. A beautiful environment leads more people to want to be in that environment (a positive function for the institution), and also has a passive positive effect on the mood of people in the environment, which in turn has a minor beneficial effect on their productivity (a positive function for those in the environment).
My school had a mix of classic brick buildings as well as steel and glass. I preferred the steel buildings mainly because they were better-maintained and they let in a lot more natural light.
From the Wikipedia article on Morse College [0] (one of Saarinen's two 1962 residences lauded by this article):
> …in a modern attempt to capture the spirit of Gothic architecture, Saarinen eliminated all right angles from the living areas. […] This resulted, notoriously, in two rooms which had eleven walls, none of which was long enough to put the bed against and still be able to open the door.
Is the mark of “good” architecture the degree to which it is hostile or inscrutable to its inhabitants? Even this author admits that the new colleges are an excellent execution of the Collegiate Gothic style; not only are they _livable_ spaces, they are _beautiful_ ones!
The linked article about USC's new "University Village" is pretty brutal too, calling it "Disneyland meets Hogwarts."[1] Disneyland is a good call metaphorically whenever something's elaborately fake, though I'm also comparing all these projects to the Las Vegas strip. Lavish expenditure to recreate something already done elsewhere, producing the strange feeling that it's fake (a copy), yet it's real (somebody spent the money to make it happen).
Is there no middle ground between uncompromisingly hostile modernism and ass-backwards retro-fakery?
The semiotics of Gothic architecture prize religious orders and divinely anointed kings. Notions of citizenship and universal political equality are alien to it. It's why America represented its pursuit of democracy with the new Federal style after winning its independence. Representing democratic ideals are why America chose iconography from Athens for its neoclassic buildings.
The problem with Gothic architecture in America is not so much that it looks back, but where its gaze points. It points at Earls and Dukes and the entrenchment of an entitled class.
> To my earlier question as to why the university would pursue this course, the easy and obvious response is that the traditionalist architecture of the old colleges has become essential to Yale’s identity...
> When the decision was made [in 1958] to add two colleges ...Yale chose to go modern and to hire Eero Saarinen... he rose to the challenge magnificently.
> Admittedly, acceptance of Morse and Stiles Colleges was fitful. I’ll confess that when I entered Yale as a freshman in 1969 I was pleased to be assigned to ... [a] Gothic quadrangles — and not to one of the “new” residences. After taking Vincent Scully’s course in modern architecture and learning of Saarinen’s importance...
OK, so the traditional aping of Oxbridge is an important part of Yale's branding and he himself is a testament to that. Yet he thinks they should do something essentially inauthentic? As he says elsewhere himself in this essay, dorms are different from academic buildings, and are a crucial part of branding.
MIT also built some Saarinen dorms and I remember people living in them being unhappy with them just on a functional basis.
This would be just as good as a parody of the out-of-touch humanist, except I know it's authentic.
As an engaged alumnus and attentive to such matters, I do not recall any open search for an architect for the major new buildings — the selection just happened.
This is a pernicious problem facing Ivy League institutions. Some administrator might complain bitterly that the entire process had been widely publicized and that anyway qualified architects would have known to call, but further review will discover that all publicity took place on a physical bulletin board and several private mailing lists. The faculty have not held the administration to account on numerous questionable decisions small and large, and now the bureaucrats feel they're accountable to no one.
It's pretty strange for Yale to have named a college after Benjamin Franklin, who had virtually no association with Yale or New Haven beyond a 1753 honorary degree — especially because he is so tightly connected to Ivy League rival UPenn. I've heard some people half-jokingly begin referring to it as "Aretha Franklin" college instead. She is at least equally qualified (her honorary degree was in 2010)!
tl;dr - a major donor ($250 million) is a Franklin fan. He cut a check for nearly half the estimated cost of the college, so they named it in honor of one of his heroes.
> tl;dr - a major donor ($250 million) is a Franklin fan. He cut a check for nearly half the estimated cost of the college, so they named it in honor of one of his heroes.
That's honestly way better than naming it after yet another major donor.
This article is spot-on. I've seen this firsthand at both USC and Wash U. in St. Louis, and the author's conclusion (that universities think building in the style of their oldest buildings will give them more donor money) is correct in my view from how the universities talk about it.
It's sad that top private universities today are so revenue-focused that they're okay with dropping any semblance of innovation when it comes to architecture and design. But these universities don't care about their architecture schools - those schools don't put out enough rich alumni to bring in the cash.
At USC a few years ago, the architecture school was stuck with old (and few) 3d printers - I don't remember the model, but students complained and got nowhere with the faculty as far as better equipment. Next door, the USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy of Arts, Technology, and Business of Innovation (read: try to make startups) opened their first class with a whole lab of 3d printers and laser cutters, including a Form 1 (which was quite nice at the time for the price). The school doesn't take architecture seriously. And I don't see how that would change anytime soon.
American universities being fairly conservative architecturally is hardly a new development. Look at how popular faux-Gothic is at any Ivy League school. They are all full of modern buildings trying to look like Oxbridge.
Absolutely, it's not a new thing. I don't mean to be implying it's a new development, or limited to these schools. Just expressing how sad and frustrating it can feel as an architecture student at a good university. It's talked about a lot among students, and I liked this article for sharing it among a wider audience.
I went to the University of Utah for my undergrad degree. Smack dab in the middle of campus is a looming Brutalist monstrosity in the form of the BEHS Building [0]. Students often joke that there must be some sort of horrific psychology experiments happening behind those "barred" window frames. One problem withe the U of U's architecture is that it is incoherent, a mish-mash of buildings made to whatever style seemed like a good idea at the time.
In contrast, Purdue University (where I am doing grad school) has done a great job of keeping most of the buildings as a coherent whole. There are design variations from the older Purdue Student Union [1] to the more experimental Armstrong Engineering Building [2], but the general theme of brickwork makes things generally fit together and connects the whole campus to its "1800s Midwestern college" roots. It's a pleasant place to be and I think the architecture contributes to a sense of community.
The author of the article is I think extremely misguided in his arguments. He seems to imply that older architecture forms and traditions have no place in a "forward-looking" "globalized future", as if the local traditions and practices of a space have to all be eroded away into a future of glass/steel boxes in the style of international airports -- as if novelty for its own sake should be the main guiding practice.
>It is worth pointing out that in those same years the university was not only choosing to abandon its historicist architecture; it was also working actively, if belatedly, to renounce the quotas that had long limited the enrollment of diverse groups — Jews, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos — and beginning the deliberations that would lead to coeducation.
This line of argument is uncharitable at best; it implies that historical architecture is somehow permanently stained by bad practices done during that time period. It's the same sort of hand-wringing arguments you see about how games like "Cuphead" that use an old-timey animation style are "unsettling" because some actual old-timey animations would be considered racist in our time [3]. I'd much rather live in a world where we can take the good from the past and carry it forward, rather than seek to reinvent ourselves entirely from the last generation.
Traditional architecture is a bit of a pet issue of mine, mostly because of its public nature. I'm all for experimentation and breaking the mold in most art forms, but architecture is inherently public -- you can't easily look away from a building that's an eyesore than you could a painting. For that reason I tend to think that architecture should favor more traditional/conservative forms.
There's an interesting irony about the article, in complaining that this push for traditional architecture in colleges is being pushed by a wealthy plutocratic elite. These old styles are being pushed for because the donors like them, because they contribute to a general sense of charm and nostalgia that keeps a community cohesive. People in general have a positive attitude toward more traditional forms. If anything, it's a different sort of elite -- modern architects -- who are attempting to impose something on these campuses for the sake of their own experimentation.
I went to UW for undergrad and UU for grad school. UU was definitely a mish mash of whatever was modern for the time, but I would argue it was also poorly executed. In contrast, EPFL, which as a European university is immune to neo gothic architecture, did much better with whatever was modern st the time (to a pre oil embargo space ship plastic building to the most recent Swiss cheese addition).
Also, those buildings will age gracefully and never look stupid. We know this because there are thousands of similar buildings, from the middle ages to the revivals in the 1800s and 1900s that still don't look stupid after multiple centuries.