(Tweed Madness invited Lawrence Biemiller, a Chronicle architecture writer, to propose his own Final Four based on the structures gracing the campuses that have teams playing in the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament. His opinions follow.)
I’m not much of a sports fan.
Princeton's Whig Hall
So when I look at the names in this year’s March Madness brackets — or any year’s, really — I don’t see players or coaches or even mascots, but campus architecture.
Betting on the buildings makes two of the final four easy to pick-Princeton and Pitt, respectively-but the third is troublesome: Duke or Cincinnati? (Which, architecturally, is just another way of asking whether you like your buildings to look old or new.) And the fourth? I’d say it’s a roll of the dice but we’re talking about two of the country’s best known Catholic colleges, Georgetown and Notre Dame, so I guess the call may be made by a higher authority than Lady Luck.
Here’s my thinking.
In Newark, Princeton beats North Carolina to advance to Houston. Princeton has one of the strongest all-around collections of campus buildings anywhere. It has amazing antiquities, like the William Potter’s 1873 Chancellor Green Library and the twin debating-society buildings from the 1890s, Cliosophic and Whig (the latter, thanks to a early-1970s renovation by Charles Gwathmey, doubles as a landmark of Modernism). Princeton has some of the country’s best, and best known, Collegiate Gothic buildings, including Cope and Stewardson’s 1897 Blair Hall. And a number of its newer buildings are pretty amazing, too, like Robert Venturi’s Gordon Wu Hall, and Rafael Viñoly’s Icahn Laboratory. No contest, really — a Princeton sweep.
In New Orleans, I see Pitt beating Wisconsin. Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning isn’t my favorite college building, not by a long shot. But what a great story behind it! A daring young president takes over a university, scraps its existing Greek Revival campus plan, and hires one of the best architects in the country — Charles Z. Klauder — to build what is still the tallest academic structure in the hemisphere (he even plays recordings of Wagner to give the architect an idea of the impression the building should make). Then the Great Depression hits, and the president — John G. Bowman — sets about collecting pennies from Pittsburgh schoolchildren to make his building a reality. Fearing that the trustees will opt to stop building before the tower reaches its full height, he has the contractors finish the upper stories first, before the ground floor. It’s an unbeatable story.
That brings us to Anaheim, and the Duke/Cincinnati matchup. I like Collegiate Gothic as much as anyone, at least if it’s done well, and at Duke it’s done very, very well. (Speaking of good stories, the lion’s share of the design work for the university’s iconic buildings was by a black architect, Julian Abele, who worked in anonymity for Horace Trumbauer’s firm.) But Duke’s played it pretty safe ever since, while Cincinnati’s taken all kinds of architectural chances — on Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, Thom Mayne, Bernard Tschumi. Not all of the resulting buildings have been successes, but risk-taking has put this institution on the map, architecturally. And in that, it beats Duke.
What’s left is San Antonio. The first- and second-round matchups don’t wow me. The only showdown I see puts Georgetown’s handsome but sober 1879 landmark, Healy Hall, up against Notre Dame’s far more exuberant Main Building, with its golden dome and ornate interior. If Notre Dame’s Main Building were a basketball player, in fact, you’d think he was showboating, and you’d be right. Georgetown, founded by Jesuits, takes a more serious approach architecturally. I’m going with Georgetown, but it’s a close call — and, as I said before, not really mine to make.
So, the Final Four: Princeton against Georgetown, Cincinnati against Pitt.
—Lawrence Biemiller
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