[Photo: Credit: Campus facility (UA023.005), Special Collections Research Center, North Carolina State University Libraries, Raleigh, North Carolina.]
Like the child who pointed out that the emperor had no clothes, someone is finally admitting that the great wave of Modernist buildings on academic campuses—constructed from the 1960s until very recently—has not been a success. We may think of universities as places of ivy-covered brick walls and quaint quads, but the fact is that for decades, universities chose to construct stark “form follows function” buildings admired by architects, but rarely by students.
Here at North Carolina State University, Harrelson Hall, built in 1962, was torn down in 2016. Even the NC State website describes Harrelson as “a circular freak of a building that flummoxed students with its spiral ramps, windowless classrooms and ductwork that whooshed like a subway tunnel.”
Harrelson was over 50 years old when it was taken down, but I frequently walk by a newer construction, the Ricks Hall Addition, built in 2009. It is Modernist—a rectangular box connected on the second floor to the 1922 Ricks Hall, which boasts Ionic columns. The only similarity I can see to the original building is the color of the brick. I see nothing pleasing about it.
Lawrence Biemiller, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, recently reported that structures like these are being torn down on campuses around the country. His story features the Mattin Center at Johns Hopkins University. “The complex, a three-building fantasia of ramps and stairs by the architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, opened in 2001 and is easily the university’s highest-profile piece of contemporary architecture.” Tearing it down is particularly controversial because it is only eighteen years old, but there are many other examples of disenchantment with the Modernist or International style.
In 2007, Biemiller writes, the University of California at Irvine replaced a “quirky metal-and-stucco-clad complex for computer science and engineering” that had been built in 1986. It was designed by architect Frank Gehry early in his career. (Gehry is known for buildings like the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, disorienting concatenations of unusual shapes connected at unusual angles.) And the gigantic Crosley Tower, built in 1969 at the University of Cincinnati, is going to be destroyed.
Certainly, Modernist or International Style architecture, which spanned much of the twentieth century, created stunning masterpieces, such as Lake Point Tower in Chicago, designed by two of Mies van der Rohe’s students, and the St. Louis Gateway Arch, designed by Eero Saarinen, both built in the 1960s. And innumerable office buildings have been well-suited to the streamlined functionality championed by Modernists.
But something went wrong on campuses. The fast growth in student numbers demanded quick expansion. Some architecture or design schools must have pushed for their campuses to be in the forefront of architectural design. The nonprofit nature of universities probably explains administrators’ willingness to go along with those faculty’s desires, even if the buildings were too experimental to be practical. The Chronicle quotes Jeff Stebar, an architect with Perkins and Will: “The modern buildings were, in their era, quite shocking to many, and when people look back, they think that they don’t blend.”
In my view, they don’t blend.
I hated to see Harrelson torn down as it was a creative legacy of the Kamphoefner NCSU School of Design glory days. I understand that Terry Waugh, the architect, was a relative of Evelyn Waugh. I wrote about Kamphoefner’s impact on design education in my 2005 dissertation (Ed.D. at NCSU), “Henry Leveke Kamphoefner, the Modernist, Dean of the North Carolina State University School of Design, 1948-1972.”
I have fond memories of Harrleson because it was where I had all of my history classes when going for a master’s in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Harrelson Hall was truly awful. There were two concentric rings of classrooms. In the outer rings, the rooms were shallow and wide. In its initial configuration, some students could not see the writing on the chalkboards because the chalkboards were bent to conform to the curvature of the walls. Later on, there was some remediation by building out the chalkboards so they were flat.
But still, the room was so wide that it was difficult to see the left side of the board from the right side of the room. The inner rings were narrow and deep. Think pizza slices. The boards were small, so the instructor had to erase often, which meant that students had limited opportunity to write down their notes. It was terrible.
Note that NC State has an architecture school, in fact a good one. Perhaps this outcome is a lesson in the advantages of theory versus experience.
Reminds me of the law school at the University of Montana. After their alumni recognized that they really didn’t need an entire new building and therefore didn’t contribute in sufficient quantities, the law school got a federal grant to reconstruct their building. The result is an echo-y cavernous structure that resembles nothing so much as a mausoleum.
I don’t know much about architecture, but I know what I don’t like. I grew up a stone’s throw from Swarthmore College. It had to be one of the nation’s must beautiful campuses. First of all, it was part campus and part arboretum. On one side, there is a grassy expanse dotted with magnificent trees, coming uphill from the Swarthmore railroad station. On another, there is a rocky, forested canyon leading down to Crum Creek. And on a third side, there is a neighborhood of large, uniquely beautiful homes built mostly in the early 1900s. The campus buildings were built of grey stone; the larger ones were majestic and the smaller ones exuded warmth. It was what one wanted from a liberal arts campus, an island of tradition and order in a chaotic world. Then, in the 1960s, the campus leaders got together and asked, “Our campus is nearly perfect—how can we screw it up?” So they plunked down a couple of metal, glass, and cement monstrosities in one area, which had the same aesthetic effect as inserting Rosie O’Donnell and Caitlyn Jenner into a lineup of Las Vegas chorus girls.
Unfortunately, unlike NC State and some of the other schools mentioned here, Swarthmore has not seen the error of their ways and leveled the offending structures.
It’s said that in Harrelson Hall, if you sat on one side of the classroom that you couldn’t see the other edge of the chalkboard. Also I believe that the building was sinking. The rumor was that it had been designed by NCSU architecture students. This building was clearly form over function and the form wasn’t even good.
An interesting way to look into the administration of academia. Results vary by campus, of course, but your piece reminds me of the mid 60s to 70s at UNC-CH when I was on the faculty of the English Dept. and we were getting a new building.
Several senior English faculty and administrators sat on a committee to consult and suggest design. They even had a Committee on Fenestration (couldn’t call it windows even in the pre-Microsoft days). In Murphy Hall, an old 3 story brick building, younger faculty had 2 and 3 profs to an office. Everyone met on the stairways and at the window alcoves of the landings. Lots of informal chance meetings with faculty and students.
In the new Greenlaw Hall, immediately we had a temperature problem because none of the windows opened and heating and AC were the same top to bottom.
Only faculty could use the elevators except in emergencies, so no faculty-student encounters except by drop-in or appointment, and only brief faculty chance encounters.
I used to observe that this any humanities scholar involved in planning that building should have been dismissed as inhumane.