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Green Building, Red Tape
Some colleges have decided to build sustainably but skip costly LEED certification. (Photo courtesy Northern Arizona U.)
Princeton Review Will Issue 'Green' Ratings in Coming College Guide
Guest Blogger: Xarissa Holdaway
Unconsciously, many universities follow smart-growth principles
Guest Blogger: Lawrence Speck
A few words in praise of Modern buildings (a few of them, at least)
Other News
Thieves hit U. of Michigan Stadium Construction Site
Jahn's Library Dome at U. of Chicago: Elegant Minimalism or Self-Indulgent Object?
Anticipation Builds for U. of Louisville Health Research Facility
New campus buildings
Multimedia
Modernism in Albany
(An audio slide show)
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About Buildings & Grounds
Buildings & Grounds is written by Scott Carlson (left) and Lawrence Biemiller (right). Scott Carlson writes about architecture, facilties, energy, and sustainability, among other topics. Lawrence Biemiller writes about architecture and facilities and contributes to Notes from Academe. What's happening on your campus? Let us know.
At Yale, Architects Consider Universities as Patrons
New Haven, Conn. — A Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who is partly responsible for two of the most striking and controversial buildings of the past 10 years — Steven Holl’s Simmons Hall and Frank Gehry’s Stata Center, both at MIT — said Saturday that “mindless commodity architecture” should be no more acceptable on college campuses than “second-rate physics or banal history.”
“It is a fundamental responsibility of universities to pursue architecture and urbanism at the highest intellectual level and the highest level of cultural ambition,” said the professor, William J. Mitchell, who teaches architecture and served for 10 years as architecture adviser to MIT’s former president, Charles M. Vest. In the latter capacity, Mr. Mitchell said, his job was “to be a persuasive advocate of architecture in the broader community” and to help foster “lively, informed discourse about architecture and its role.”
Mr. Mitchell was one of a dozen speakers at an engaging but underpublicized Yale University symposium entitled “Building the Future: the University as Architectural Patron.” The symposium, half architectural-history lesson and half pep rally for architects who work on campuses, was built around the university’s annual Brendan Gill Lecture, named after the former New Yorker architecture writer. This year’s lecturer was David Brownlee, chairman of the University of Pennsylvania’s art-history department.
Like Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Brownlee sees higher education as having a societal responsibility to build well. “What we do as patrons of architecture is terrifically important because of the moral, intellectual, and increasingly financial leadership that our institutions exert in our society,” he said.
“We have the world’s most important work to do — the creation of knowledge and the sharing of wisdom, and we bring to this work exemplary values. We aim to be rational and free of prejudice, but creative and experimental. We need architecture in which to do this work and with which to express these ideals.”
Mr. Mitchell also said institutions like MIT and Yale should be held to high architectural standards because they are major landowners in their cities, because they put up buildings intended to last 50 or 100 years, and because they are rich. “We’re long-term owners. We’re not like a speculative developer who’s going to build a building and flip it in a couple of years. It makes sense to invest in building well. We can also mobilize capital. Money is always short, but we do have access to endowments. We’re institutions that have triple-A bond ratings. We have access to donors.”
So why aren’t more university buildings better? For one thing, Mr. Mitchell said, universities are “complex seething masses of individuals and suborganizations with different goals and different cultural perspectives, often in conflict. And that complexity is both the strength of the university but also the reason that lots of people just give up.”
Also, he said, “Universities are large conservative bureaucracies in many respects, in which people who have to execute projects are often punished for mistakes and not rewarded for innovation. So there’s a cultural issue that has to be dealt with that often creates very risk-averse behavior.”
Mr. Brownlee, after covering the history of American campus architecture from Harvard University’s earliest buildings through postmodernism, said that universities are today “tiresomely” conservative. “This comes from the kind of history-minded work that we do, and from the kind of people that support this work, and I fear that a great deal of it comes from laziness,” he said. He also blamed what he said was a sense of mutual distrust separating faculty and staff members, and the number of people involved in any university building project. “Clam chowder,” he said, “is what you get when you apply peer review to paella.”
Karen Van Lengen, dean of the University of Virginia’s architecture school, was one of several speakers who worried that “branding” had “hijacked the architectures of actual spaces and actual experiences.”
At her institution, she said, the Rotunda has become the university’s brand. “It’s our logo. It’s on our letterhead, it’s on napkins. It’s on everything that we do at UVa. And this branding phenomenon has driven much of the decision-making process at UVa, particularly in the recent past.”
“So I guess the question I want to ask today,” she said, “is, How does a university deploy planning, architecture, and landscape architecture to support and project its mission beyond the imagery level alone, and equally important, how can design support the real experience of teaching, learning, and research? I’d like to make the case that as clients in this arena of architecture and planning we look a little deeper, past the wallpaper solution — as we refer to it at UVa, the Jefferson wallpaper solution — that is so prevalent, not only on my campus but all across America.”
Ms. Lengen also asked how universities could be persuaded to offer more design opportunities to promising young architects, just as promising young scholars are offered interesting research projects. Laura Cruickshank, university planner at Yale, said that was a question she struggled with.
“On the one hand, I think it is the university’s responsibility to do that, and on the other hand, I’m not exactly sure how to achieve it,” said Ms. Cruickshank. She said that deadlines tied to the campus calendar — “You have to finish the residential college before the students come back and move in” — tended to “push us away from using or recommending one of the smaller kinds of firms.”
Most of those attending the symposium appeared to be either architects — in private practice, on university faculties, or both — or art historians, or students. There was almost no hint of the controversy that has surrounded many campus buildings since the early years of Modernism — except in Mr. Brownlee’s tour of campus architectural history. He said that “the loss of faith in architecture in general and Modern architecture in particular” in the early 1970s ended a “fruitful period” of campus construction, and that a subsequent increase in preservation of older building was “inspired in no little part, I’m afraid, by the conviction that architects couldn’t be trusted to make new buildings.”
David Joselit, chairman of Yale’s art-history department, did ask Chris McVoy, a senior partner at Steven Holl Architects, whether MIT students had been consulted about the design of Simmons Hall. “We’ve been under the impression that students prefer more traditional dorm situations,” Mr. Joselit said. Mr. McVoy replied that the building had turned out to be “very provocative.”
“There are some students who complain about living there. There are some students who love living there. The goal was to create an environment where students would become engaged with their environment and with each other, and at that level it’s worked extremely well.”
“They have encounters with the architecture,” he said. “They create events. They do movies about the building. It’s like a character. You could almost say it’s like a teacher who has a strong position that provokes thought.”
As for Mr. Gehry’s Stata Center, it was mentioned a number of times, but with no reference to MIT’s lawsuit against the architect, or to the building’s having become a lightening rod for criticism of what John R. Silber, the former president of Boston University, decries in a new book as “architecture of the absurd.”
Mack Scogin, a former chairman of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design who is a principal in Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects, did make a oblique reference to the Stata Center as a building that “you see in the paper a lot these days.” Then he went on to recall a meeting with computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, where his firm has designed the new Gates Center for Computer Science.
“They spent an hour critiquing the Stata Center,” he said. “‘It leaks.’ ‘Oh God, it leaks.’ ‘You know it leaks.’ ‘You can hear everybody from one office to the next.’ All these things that they’re having to do [to fix the building]. And in the end of this conversation, which we were just listening to, the dean there at Carnegie Mellon said, ‘You know what, though? You go in that building and you just feel like anything could happen there.’ And they all agreed and said, ‘Yeah.’” —Lawrence Biemiller
Lawrence Biemiller | Monday January 28, 2008 | Permalink | Contact us
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