Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Based on your pics, I prefer the after, although I agree that the money was probably best spent elsewhere.
young people are paying tens of thousands of dollars a year to go to these overpriced colleges with tuition constantly going up 10 to 20 per cent a year, with money they have to borrow and will end up with debt up to their eyeballs when they graduate. if they are lucky to find a job in this economy. what are the schools doing with all that student loan money they are getting? is it to much to ask of them to build a dignified campus environment for their students and architecture that doesn't resemble the DMV? or the state's mental health treatment facility? I guess it is.
My priority would be that they put a greater emphasis in education than obsessing over a so-called dignified campus environment. Then again, I went to a public university, most of which at least in California, don't have that dignified campus environment you're speaking of. They do, however, provide much more education for your tuition dollar, so I never spent tens of thousands per year to go there. There's plenty of little liberal arts colleges with lax admission standards for those that care more about the dignified campus environment. St. Mary's at Moraga... beautiful campus, not a bad school either, or Gonzaga in Spokane, WA. Nothing wrong with either, but you can get a better education a national renowned public university without paying tens of thousands a year. Gonzaga and St. Mary's aren't really what I'd call lax in admission standards, they just have really nice campuses as opposed to say Pepperdine which looks like a bank:
Likewise, went to UC Davis. Since it wasn't built in the 20th century, it doesn't look anything like what campuses built in the 20th century look like. There's actually more cohesiveness to the architecture. Chem Annex, Physics, Phy Sci & Engineering library all have a similar look, Bainer (Engineering 1) somewhat blends, Engineering II and III and Surge, the new life science buildings, the buildings around Silo reflect its style.
Memorial Union facing the Quad, basically where liberal art majors and lower-division undergraduates hang out: Panoramio - Photo of Memorial Union, UC Davis #1
Wellman Hall, Calculus, to English, to History, to Engineering... I doubt anyone (undergrad) hasn't taken a class in Wellman. Along with its central location just off the quad, this makes it the best known instructional building.
Death Star: aka Soc Sci & Humanities -- mostly offices,
Silo: Functions as the Memorial Union for upper-division life science majors.
Academic Surge: The hangout for upper-division Engineer majors:
Shields Library:
Chemistry Annex:
Science & Engineering library
I appreciate the captions.
otherwise one could easily mistake any of those buildings for the Dept. of Motor Vehicles. the deathstar building in particular resembles a mental health facility for the criminally insane. how cute and amusing that they call it the humanities building.
otherwise one could easily mistake any of those buildings for the Dept. of Motor Vehicles. the deathstar building in particular resembles a mental health facility for the criminally insane. how amusing that they call it the humanities building.
Trying to figure out how to get somewhere in that building may well have driven someone to become criminally insane. It's a surprisingly beautiful building in its way, but it's rather impractical.
My priority would be that they put a greater emphasis in education than obsessing over a so-called dignified campus environment. Then again, I went to a public university, most of which at least in California, don't have that dignified campus environment you're speaking of.
Not familiar with most of them, but Humboldt State and UC Berkeley have a dignified campus environment, or at least a nice looking one. Probably UC Santa Cruz and UC Santa Barbara as well.
I'd agree with you, but this isn't a so-called dignified building, at least to me.
For someone who appreciates actual archeticture beyond the facade, it's a fascinating building and completely at home in Humboldt State. It just doesn't fit into that Ivy League/Oxford/Cambridge mold of what a campus should look like.
some background info on the UCD humanities building. sad but amusing.
The Social Sciences and Humanities Building (SOCSCI), designed by Southwest architect Antoine Predock, is a complex, five-storied, maze-like building of classrooms, labs, and offices.
It is commonly referred to as the Death Star by students because of its shiny metallic appearance from the outside (reminiscent of the Death Star from Star Wars), as well as the fact that architecturally it is such a maze. The glassed-in catwalk between the two center wings is just begging for a lightsaber duel.
Predock's design philosophy is very concerned with how the structure interacts with its surroundings. He has called his style "abstract landscape"; thus he blends the structure in with the surrounding landscape 1. The building also interacts with the people who use it. It was supposedly designed on purpose to be confusing. Visitors are often forced to talk to someone to find out how to get to where they need to go. Doorways that you need to pass through will sometimes be locked, forcing you to find a new way. The doors that get locked rotate every so often, further confusing the situation. The idea was to force human interaction because it houses the social sciences. The building also has a number of Emergency Buttons, colloquially referred to as "Panic Buttons" located throughout.
...Drunken students often make their way to the top of the west tower (which houses the library for Agricultural and Resource Economics) late at night, as the tower commands a view of most of the bits of campus that are worth looking at. Similarly, Davis youth have been known to go to the top of the building with outdated CRT monitors, only to throw them off the roof and watch them crash to the ground. (It should be noted that the university frowns upon both these practices.)
Speaking of funky campus buildings, how about the home of the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning at the University of Cincinnati:
UC has quite a few cool post-modern buildings. This is the Center for Molecular Science; to me, it looks like a pink birthday cake melting in the sun:
There was a LOT of grumbling about these when they were built because they didn't look like "traditional" college buildings. I think they're very cool.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.