Lawrence Speck, one of May’s Buildings & Grounds guest bloggers, is professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was dean of architecture from 1992 to 2001. He is also a principal in the architecture firm Page Southerland Page.
I hear a lot of negative comments about Modern buildings put up from the 1950s through the 1980s. Many are deemed to be ugly and intrusive and to contribute little to the overall environment of the historic campuses on which they were built. They are often described as boxy and graceless, as eyesores. Their roofs have often leaked and they have had serious maintenance problems, fueling the flames of rejection. At my own institution, the University of Texas at Austin, two structures from this period engender extraordinary venom—an enormous dormitory and a complex of buildings built for engineering.
Lawrence Speck
I absolutely agree with this assessment of many buildings of this era. I don’t think the problem was Modernism, though, so much an attitude toward building in that period. It was a time of enormous growth in higher education, and campuses across the country were adding buildings at breakneck speed. It was also a very pragmatic period, and many universities were just trying to get a lot more square feet quickly at the minimum cost per square foot. University administrations proudly compared themselves to real-estate developers for whom the short-term bottom line was the measure of success. Administrators seemed to forget that—unlike developers who could depreciate buildings quickly and sell them—universities keep their buildings for decades or even centuries. The short-term bottom line is not a good measure of success.
It just so happened that this period of economic misjudgment coincided with an increasing interest in Modern building. It was also convenient that an architectural expression like Modernism, which eschewed applied ornament and labor-intensive construction methods, could be dumbed down and built cheaply more easily than could some other expressions. So we got a lot of cheap, ugly Modern buildings.
Thankfully, we also got a fair number of very beautiful Modern buildings on campuses in this era. They stand as proof of the ability of this expression to fit amiably into a historic context and to express their era with poignancy and grace. It’s time to give full appreciation to these fine buildings and to embrace them as integral and important contributions to the total campus environment.
Two extraordinary examples of Modern buildings are worth special mention because they are particularly responsive and appropriate on their campuses, but also express the technologies and social character of their era. Yale University’s Morse and Stiles Colleges, designed by Eero Saarinen and completed in 1962, were the first new residential colleges constructed on the campus since World War II. They build on the strong tradition of other residential colleges at Yale both in their general configuration (which promotes a strong sense of community) and their visual character. But these are unabashedly Modern buildings. They seem completely integral with their neighbors and yet they are fresh iconic expressions of their era, built with construction methods and materials that are appropriate to the technology of the 1960s.
The library at Phillips Exeter Academy—a prep school with a campus as historic as any university’s—is another example of a beautifully integrated Modern building. Designed by Louis Kahn and completed in 1972, this building occupies the heart of its largely Georgian red-brick campus. It has the same simple geometry, regular rhythms of windows, and strong masonry walls as its neighbors. But it is unapologetically Modern.
There are also, of course, whole campuses or large parts of campuses built in this era that show how powerful Modern buildings can be in ensembles. Two that come to mind are the Illinois Institute of Technology, with a core of buildings by Mies van der Rohe, and Trinity University in San Antonio, by O’Neil Ford and many associated architects. And then there are those one-off Modern buildings that do in fact stick out in their contexts but are very powerful and wonderful nevertheless—like the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, by Le Corbusier.
I think it’s time to differentiate the slip-shod, poorly made Modern buildings from the very fine ones and to understand the great contribution this expression has made, and continues to make, to campus environments. —Lawrence Speck
You can read Mr. Speck’s earlier post here.
Follow Buildings & Grounds through your favorite RSS reader: