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THE ARCHITECTURE ISSUE
The Chronicle Review's yearly look at architecture examines buildings on and off campuses. Above, Caltech's new Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, designed by Morphosis. (Chronicle photograph by Lawrence Biemiller)
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U. of Tennessee Landmark to Move to Nearby Location
New campus buildings
Multimedia
Pomona's Skyspace
The artist James Turrell turned a Pomona College courtyard into a work of art worth waking up at dawn for.
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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.
Guest Blogger: Reflections in a Campus Fountain
Harvard University’s Tanner Fountain (Photo by Alan Ward)
Last October the American Society of Landscape Architects gave Harvard University’s Tanner Fountain its coveted Landmark Award. The award, given jointly with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is noteworthy not only because it honors a design these venerable arbiters deemed transformative, but also because it honored a fountain—a campus fountain, no less.
Since then, I’ve been thinking about campus fountains. Actually, I think about campus fountains often. I walk past three on my own campus quite regularly, and I rarely fail to pause—or sometimes linger—and drink them in. I’ve been known to toss a coin and make a wish.
 Marc Mayerson |
How many campuses have fountains? Poorer is the college that does not. True, they are the banes of groundskeepers, plumbers, and moralists. Filters clog with leaves, pumps break and water stagnates, pranksters pour in bubble bath, and occasionally a sorority sister is found splashing drunk and naked. But the cost—in time, money, and perhaps a good girl’s reputation—pales beside the benefits: the sound, the spray, the movement, the lunchtime visitors like shorebirds at the water’s edge, the wavy reflection of a building at twilight, an unforgettable kiss, the broken-hearted test taker pondering an uncertain future, the diaphanous rainbow in a wispy mist.
When fountains succeed, they succeed spectacularly. Among those that come to mind are the University of Notre Dame’s Clarke Memorial Fountain; St. Louis University’s Clock Tower Fountain; Purdue University’s Loeb Fountain; the Littlefield Fountain at the University of Texas at Austin; and the University of Washington’s dramatic Drumheller Fountain, with Mount Rainier snowcapped in the background. Some, like the beloved Inverted Fountain at the University of California at Los Angeles, join the ranks of the Tanner Fountain as award-winning designs.
Fountains are metaphors for the campuses themselves. Foremost, they are water come alive, and like oceans and rivers they conjure the aqueous wombs of our fostering mothers. They spring forth from dryness, oases appearing from eternal, internal springs. We come together around them in temporary harmony, like thirsty animals surrounding a savannah watering hole. Fountains are art, too, and they are philosophy. They are architecture and engineering, fluid dynamics and mathematics. They are film studies, sociology, and communications, as well as psychology, history, geology, and geography.
Ironically, fountains have become ubiquitous, albeit in lesser forms. Mass-produced, faux-Rococo fountains dot suburban yards and supermarkets. Desktop Zen pools spout water through bamboo colored plastic piping, keeping shiny marbles spinning. Shopping malls pump lighted water over floor-to-ceiling slabs of slate. Do we risk burning out on them?
I hope not—for the generations who have yet to make sweet memories beside their campus fountains, I hope not. For the lovers whose hearts will someday pulse in time to the fountains’ jets, I hope not. For the very reason we make wishes over and toss coins into them, I hope not. —Marc Mayerson
Marc Mayerson, assistant dean of social sciences at University of California at Los Angeles, is the Buildings & Grounds guest blogger for July. You can read his previous posts here, here, and here.
Buildings & Grounds | Friday July 25, 2008 | Permalink | Contact usComments
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Great memories of the fountain in front of the Edmon Low Library at Oklahoma State University as well as Theta Pond.
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