Boston Architecture Critic Visits U. of Cincinnati, and Misses Politeness

Moore, Ruble, Yudell’s Joseph A. Steger Student Life Center at the U. of Cincinnati.

Robert Campell, architecture critic for The Boston Globe, has paid his first visit to the University of Cincinnati in two decades, and he’s not sure he likes everything he saw.

“Cincinnati feels as if it must have hired every famous architect in the world,” he writes. “The campus is a celebrity party of what real-estate ads are now calling ‘signature architects.’” Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, Bernhard Tschumi, Thom Mayne, and Buzz Yudell — among others — have all contributed buildings to a campus whose master plan was drawn up by the landscape architect George Hargreaves.

“What it all adds up to at Cincinnati is a heady air of both excitement and confusion,” Mr. Campbell says. “Big bold buildings belly up to Main Street on every side. They push and jostle at one another. There’s no feeling of architectural politeness. Quite the opposite, in fact. There’s an obvious love of congestion. Things crash together, often at bizarre angles. You get the sense of the colliding multiple initiatives of city life, rather than the calmer, more pastoral image sought by many universities.”