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March 05, 2008, 10:57 AM ET
A Dean Discusses the Most-Disliked Architecture-School Buildings
Peter Eisenman’s Aronoff Center for Design and Art at the U. of Cincinnati (U. of Cincinnati image)
Thomas Fisher, dean of the University of Minnesota’s College of Design, has a few harsh things to say about the kinds of buildings that house architecture schools. In an essay for our Architecture Issue, Mr. Fisher explains why some architecture schools are housed in “some of the worst buildings on their campuses.”
His essay is based on evaluations of recent architecture-school buildings by teams of students and faculty members. To judge the interiors, the teams checked with the buildings’ users, but ratings of the exteriors were based on surveys of passers-by (which would certainly seem to favor traditional forms over anything edgier). What the teams found was that users at many schools complained about “poor acoustics, bad lighting, uneven heating or cooling, and inadequate ventilation“—complaints that Mr. Fisher says may be the result of architects’ “depending upon lighting, acoustical, and engineering consultants to handle these increasingly complex tasks.”
Meanwhile, the buildings that passers-by most disliked were—well, read the essay and find out. But Mr. Fisher says the disliked buildings pose a question that continues to be divisive: “Should buildings seek consensus within a community or challenge peoples’ views of the world?” Architecture, he says, “has cycled back and forth between these positions, now so rapidly that both views often coexist within a single department (and are sometimes held by the same person).”
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