Here they are. UD comments on each one.
The writer starts with a new building at Yale, and there’s a reason he starts with this project. It’s the best. By far. Most of the others are quite bad, but the Edward P. Evans Hall, with its soft light ‘fifties modernism footprint is simply a pretty, non-jarring, non-aggressive addition to the campus.
Like a lot of contemporary buildings, its interior is so insanely open and abstract that things like privacy and the human specific seem totally absent. And while UD herself might not be keen on the tendency away from autonomy and individuality, she acknowledges that – especially in a business building – an architect has to reflect the digitized groupworld of the people who inhabit the construction. Evans Hall’s walls feature massive childish Sol LeWitt wall art, reflecting the thin bright bold everything-supersized world of postmodern hedgies (Yale has plenty of gothic architecture and brooding squinting portraiture for its humanities division).
Lee Hall at Clemson (AD’s #8), for its school of architecture, is also excellent. It mirrors the mini-Dulles-Airport, modestly soaring, white-sail-like, radically open floor plan, all-windows, exteriorized technology (see the Pompidou Center) thing the Yale building’s doing – and it does all of this well. And #9, the Reid Building, is equally fine, in the same almost-all-white, radically open, large masses luminescently lit way as Lee and Evans (a critic of the building notes that “Doors are in notably short supply, the whole interior presenting a Piranesi-like fluidity.”). You could argue that Reid is out of keeping with the bricky gloom of its Scottish street, but there’s nothing wrong with having a lighthouse to perk things up.
Eh, okay, so that’s the good stuff. The bad buildings all have stuff in common, just as the good buildings do. Mainly the bad stuff features pointless gigantic dead abstraction (see #4, which clearly has no context at all – I don’t see anything around it – and therefore randomly sprouts, a dying mushroom and a red oxygen canister trying to pump life back into it via an obscure connecting unit); yet more abstract gigantism plus deadly overhangs (#2; #7); desperate chaotic wedging in (#3); overhangs, gigantic abstraction, and dramatic Spiderman-like pointless design features (#5); and, finally, runty off-kilter deconstructed blah with overhangs (#6).
September 8th, 2014 at 9:37AM
someone should look into how many buildings are going up on and around campuses/research-hospitals with no budget for daily use & maintenance…
September 8th, 2014 at 11:25AM
The Yale thing is a little too symmetrical for me and the front with columns a little reminiscent of stolid Kennedy Center, whose stolid exterior never did it for me. Not the Louvre’s pyramid, but still, not bad.
The new New School building. Yikes! It looks like it might eat passersby. One might dress as this building for Halloween
Though not a University building, let me recommend the very modern Paul Klee museum in
Berne, Switzerland for wonderful, blend of interior and exterior, harmonized with the landscape. And a truly wonderful museum.
September 8th, 2014 at 11:49AM
Greg: I agree that the Yale building comes perilously close not merely to the Kennedy Center, but to Lincoln Center. But I think it’s smaller, lighter, and brighter, than those other two.
I’ll check out images of the Klee place.
September 8th, 2014 at 2:51PM
Architects differentiate between “foreground” and “background” buildings. The difference is between bold- striking-novel-ghastly “statement” structures on one hand, and nice, attractive but functional buildings on the other. Campus leaders at schools that can afford it will always want a foreground building by a celebrity architect, no matter what fits the site or the building’s intended function. My limited experience in dealing with plans for new buildings is that it takes a very strong-willed user (e.g. a dean of a school) with a clear idea of how the building will work in daily practice to resist the determination to get a non-functional foreground building at all costs.
September 8th, 2014 at 4:50PM
The Singh Center at Penn (#2) looks far better in person than the sterile AD photo would suggest. The overhang is quite dramatic when viewed head-on, and the play of light from inside the building (at night) and by reflection (daytime) can be quite fetching.
September 8th, 2014 at 5:38PM
Jeff: I’ll look for other images of the building – it’ll be hard to convince me that the overhang is anything other than creepy — when you’re under it.
September 9th, 2014 at 7:41AM
Yale’s got some excellent buildings, along with Paul Rudolph’s infamous Art and Architecture thing. My theory about that building is that Architecture was just having a bad day.