… is SUNY Cobleskill, a dispiriting collection of ‘sixties buildings along the road into the old but not very charming town of Cobleskill, New York. The university has a cute web page, but its drab, not too well-maintained, public high schooly architecture is a downer — especially given its backdrop, the long hills and bright fields of the leatherstocking region.
This photo has done its best to emphasize autumn leaves and a few attractive buildings, but it still gives you a sense of what I’m talking about. In decades of summer driving in the region, Les UD‘s have never thought to turn onto the campus and take a stroll.
Same deal for SUNY Albany, which we drive past when we need to go to the city, an hour’s drive from our place way up in teeny Summit. There too, at SUNY Albany, we’ve never wanted to get out of the car, though we did once drive onto campus. A current graduate student describes the problem in a recent op/ed in the Schenectady paper:
… [T]he university is physically a cold place, marked by mammoth concrete structures. Few buildings on campus are warm and inviting. Unlike some universities, after four weeks on campus, I have yet to find a place where one can sit where it is socially acceptable, if not expected, that one will say hello to the strangers at the next table. Where there are picnic tables, they seem to be placed somewhere off the podium distant from one another, leaving one to feel you are the university. [Not sure what she means by this last bit — That you alone are what’s going on?]
When chairs are placed in public areas, they tend to line the walls, facing large empty spaces instead of facing other chairs. Instead of inviting those sitting to speak to those nearby, they instead force the occupant to watch others at a distance, often enforcing a feeling of loneliness.
The other evening I found myself wandering the campus accompanied by a visiting Chinese scholar of Shakespeare (whom I know from a non-university activity), hoping to sit and watch a DVD on a laptop computer. After 45 minutes we gave up. Might I suggest a few carefully placed clusters of picnic tables up on top of the podium?
The university forces people to physically be either in or out. To leave campus is literally a half-mile walk, at which point one will find oneself on the fringes of your standard suburban sprawl with little to see. By contrast, many colleges border an area specializing in goods and services for students, including clothing, books, coffee shops and cheap restaurants. Often these become tourist destinations. Might such a zone, something similar to Ithaca’s college-town neighborhood, make a good economic development project? If successful, would it add to the richness of the Capital Region, perhaps in some way resembling Albany’s Lark Street or Jay Street in Schenectady?
Lack of what architects call density makes for non-places. Things are too big, too monumental, at SUNY Albany, and the windy spaces the monuments make between themselves sharpen the sense of nothingness. Add to this the lack of any background, any physical surrounding at all outside of sky and tree, and you get existential isolation.
July 12th, 2009 at 1:38PM
Know the place – SUNY Albany.
Something about the campus reminds me of the State capitol buildings downtown. Been there?
I’ve attended a couple of functions in the summer at SUNY-Albany that were quite good. One was on X-ray fluorescence where this used to be THE place to go for the topic. The other was on computer modelling of biological systems, which also managed to attract some heavy hitters.
And I like IIT. The old Mies stuff and the new Rem Koolhaas. Scientists – or at least this one – have no taste?
July 12th, 2009 at 1:46PM
A topic dear to my heart, and one I often write about. One of the tragedies of American higher education is that its period of greatest expansion, the 1960s, coincided with a period of architectural barbarism. It will be 100 years before the damage is fully corrected.
Even when they are stuck with bad architecture, as is often the case, so many campuses fail to even try to remedy the situation with things like plantings and moveable furniture. The configuration of the built environment has a direct and tangible effect on the quality of learning that takes place in an institution. Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander ought to be required reading for all university administrators. And maybe a little John Ruskin, too:
"Therefore, when we build, let us think that we build for ever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labour and wrought substance of them, ‘See! this our fathers did for us.’"
July 12th, 2009 at 4:55PM
A school named Cobleskill? In a cluster of buildings that look like a reformatory? How utterly Dickensian!
Thank you for a thought provoking post, UD.
And to Bonzo, I’d imagine the similarities between SUNY Albany and the lifeless plazas of the capitol complex downtown are due to then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who never saw a monumental Modernist project he’d pass on. Edifice Complex and all.
July 12th, 2009 at 6:07PM
I’ve never visited either campus, but I’ve heard that both SUNY-Albany and SUNY-Buffalo were built in the middle of nowhere with the expectation that the cities would continue to grow around them. Nobody anticipated the upstate would stagnate for the next forty-plus years, any more than they anticipated how quickly modern architecture would date (though they should have thought about that one).
They did plan for the long term, but they planned for the wrong future.
July 12th, 2009 at 10:29PM
Worse than that, I’m told that there was a single firm of Albany architects who did them all. And my experience visiting SUNY schools is that one sometimes turns a corner and thinks "Wait – is this Binghamton? Oneonta? Buffalo?"
July 12th, 2009 at 11:04PM
So, judging from your beginning, sounds like there is nothing weird about my tendency to detour on road trips or pick overnight stops to check out college campuses.