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THE ARCHITECTURE ISSUE
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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: A Science Building's Design Calls Religion to Mind
 Margaret Grubiak |
Driving through Texas on a recent fall day and in need of gasoline, I pulled off Interstate 35 in Waco. I took advantage of this impromptu stop to visit one of the nation’s best-known Baptist institutions, Baylor University. Baylor’s steeples and neo-Colonial architecture read strongly even from the highway. Still, I wasn’t quite prepared for what I saw a bit farther on.
As I rounded a corner, I saw across a lush green field an enormous red-brick building. Dominating the site were three gable-ended structures, surmounted by cupolas, that were arranged in an arc and joined by two Corinthian colonnades.
The repetition of these church-like forms was impressive, and immediately my mind turned to the Green in New Haven, Conn., just outside Yale University. The New Haven Green’s three chapels, in the center of the town’s original nine-square Puritan plan, form an iconic image of American Protestantism. How interesting, I thought, for Baylor to make such a quotation in a building that I presumed served a religious function.
 Baylor Sciences Building (Baylor U. photo) |
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that this was not a new university megachurch (at least in the conventional sense), but the Baylor Sciences Building. This immense, 508,000-square-foot structure houses the most modern of Baylor’s research programs, laboratories, and teaching spaces. Here the biology, chemistry, geology, and physics departments come together under one roof.
It turns out that I shouldn’t have been surprised. For Baylor, making a science building look religious is intentional. Completed in 2004, the building is one result of the ambitious Baylor 2012 plan, whose goal is to help the university “enter the top tier of American universities while reaffirming and deepening its distinctive Christian mission.”
Becoming a nationally prominent research university while maintaining a serious Christian identity has been a difficult task. As The New York Times put it in 2004, “Baylor is trying to buck the conventional wisdom, which states that when a religious college tries to raise its academic standing, its religious mission inevitably takes a backseat to other concerns.” The Baylor 2012 vision statement calls out Harvard, Yale, and Princeton Universities and the University of Chicago as prime examples of institutions that abandoned faith for intellectual prestige.
Baylor sees the idea that an institution must choose between faith and intellectual prestige as a “figment of the modern imagination.” The Baylor 2012 plan says the university believes “that the highest intellectual excellence is fully compatible with orthodox Christian devotion.” Above the new building’s Corinthian columns is an inscription: “By Him all things are made; in Him all things are held together.” Taken from the Book of Colossians, this inscription asserts firmly that Baylor is an institution where the truths of modern science and of religion go hand in hand.
But remaining committed to this dual approach has not been without its challenges. In 2004, Baylor’s faculty senate approved a vote of no confidence for Robert Sloan, Jr., the university’s president since 1995, over academic-freedom issues. Tension between Mr. Sloan and Baylor’s science departments had also arisen over the appointment of a scholar committed to intelligent design. President Sloan’s initiatives — including the Baylor 2012 plan, which was created under his administration — appeared to challenge free academic inquiry in the name of preserving a Baptist identity. These controversies proved too much for the university, and in 2005 Baylor appointed an interim president.
This makes the architecture of the Baylor Sciences Building all the more interesting. Does it, I wonder, reflect the beliefs of the faculty members working inside it? Of the university’s president? Of the institution’s donors? Who sways the identity and mission of a university, particularly when it comes to religion? —Margaret Grubiak
Margaret Grubiak, this month’s Buildings & Grounds guest blogger, is an assistant professor of architectural history in the humanities department at Villanova University. You can read her previous posts here and here.
Buildings & Grounds | Wednesday October 15, 2008 | Permalink | Contact usComments
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The next time Ms. Grubiak drives down I-35, maybe she will stay on the road. Really, she wants to identify a tempest in a teapot…Go back to the Mendel Science Center at Villanova and leave speculations about the significance of the architecture of the Science Center at Baylor to the faculty in Waco.
— Art Cleveland Oct 15, 03:08 PM #
I think it is a really ugly building — like a church on steroids.
— eg Oct 15, 03:19 PM #
So, what do the faculty in Waco think of the building?
— perplexed Oct 15, 03:47 PM #
The Baylor Sciences Building is…weird. The interior space of the atrium (a big, open space with chairs and computers for everyone to use) is one of my favorite places to study, but the building isn’t set up in such a way to really foster research and encourage collaboration among faculty members. If you’re working alone on a project, it’s nice and new, but visiting faculty who have wanted to work together with others on their projects often find the BSB too spread out and too awkwardly arranged. It doesn’t seem to have been built with research, faculty, or students in mind.
Baylor has a large number of pre-med students who are wowed by the building, but still stumped by its odd arrangement of rooms and hallways. For example, one side of a hallway has rooms labelled “B” and the other has them labelled “C.” Go to the next hallway, and half the hall is “C” and the other half is “D.” It doesn’t make much sense. The building is awkwardly arranged—even for students—and the hallways are VERY confusing. There’s a computer guide to getting around in the building near both ends of the atrium, but it’s still a very difficult numbering/lettering system to understand.
Furthermore, the so-called “postmodern mish-mash” of architectural styles is pretty ugly, if you ask me. If they wanted a modern look, they should have stuck with it. If they wanted a traditional look, same goes—stick with one theme and run with it. But the mismatched steeples and the gaudy columns are too much.
The quote you used here, “By Him all things are made; in Him all things are held together,” seems to accurately mirror Baylor’s view of science and the natural world. Most faculty I’ve met who work there understand that there’s a big difference between the methods of science and the beliefs of religion. One even goes so far as to introduce his first day of class with, “This is a science text” (as he holds up Darwin’s Origin of Species) and “This is not” (as he holds up the Bible). We’re not as Kansas-school-board here as everyone wants to think, even if we are fairly clear on Darwin’s theory being a…theory—it still follows the scientific method, so it still belongs in a science class. One of the refreshing things about taking science at BU is that they look at everything in light of it being God’s creation, and you’re actually encouraged to make correlations between what your faith says about the natural world and what science can reveal about it as well.
All in all, though, we could have had a much more sensible building for the science departments. The building is a monument to Bobby Sloan’s overinflated ego. Had we not gone with a silly, gaudy megachurch-looking thing and not angered just about every major donor with Sloan’s “we weren’t Christian enough when you went here” nonsense, we might have had some donors fund the construction of the BSB. As it is now, most of it was built with debt—a debt students have had to bear with ridiculous increases in tuition, even if they rarely see the BSB at all. Baylor relies too heavily on student tuition and fees now because of a lack of donors who believe in the “vision 2012” (which has become a golden calf for the regents—an idol we can’t touch or amend to make actually feasible) big building projects like the BSB. Students bear around 80% of the burden in the operating budget for BU in tuition and fees. With a student loan market that will inevitably be affected by the financial crisis we’re in now, Baylor is putting itself in a precarious position with a lot of debt and a lot of reliance on students’ ability to get loans to fund their education. I fear that the BSB will not be paid off for many years if the irresponsible spending (see the recent money-for-SAT scandal, for one) does not get under control, and it will be Baylor’s students who bear the burden and suffer the most.
— From Baylor Oct 15, 09:19 PM #