A Dungeon for Nanoscience

Yesterday I walked through the length of the campus. It's generally a very pretty school, although I have some questions about the architecture.

Almost every building on campus, no matter the date of construction, is based on English Gothic style. This ranges from the obscenely Gothic campus chapel, complete with buttresses and covered with flying spires, to the most recent buildings which are all precast or cast in place concrete with concrete quoining at the corners and applied brick facia. These are the sorts of buildings that look like the windows are made of up of lots of small rectangular panes of glass, but are actually just giant pieces of float glass with fake mullions behind them.

The science buildings are the worst suited for this kind of English Gothic style. You know what kind of science went on in original English Gothic buildings? Medieval science. There's one building with a fairly convincing facade that meticulously follows the original campus buildings, but then when you look up at the roof, you realize that its a giant metal screen in the shape of a mansard roof that's feebly attempting to hide the ducting and roof mounted equipment that almost necessarily overtakes the roofs of science buildings.

The new engineering building, still under construction, and for a cutting-edge engineering department, will also look like it was stolen from an ancient British university, despite the fact that they're currently pouring the entire building from concrete. 

It's completely ridiculous to shoehorn advanced scientific and engineering programs into Gothic buildings, which is why the whole English Gothic element comes off as a badly-fitting Halloween costume. This is why it is an extremely powerful lesson in the role image and identity play in architecture. In fact, one of the things that attracted me to Wash U was the atmosphere of a small private school, which of course, was influenced by the architecture modeled after the old universities on the East Coast. Of course, even they were trying to capitalize on the image of those ancient British universities that I mentioned before.

And then it also raises the question of why the architecture and art buildings look so different. In a campus that largely attempts to fit in, the buildings associated with art and design deliberately stick out with their designs that are attempts at iconic or contemporary architecture. It seems a bit contradictory. The art/design buildings tell us- this is what is supposed to attract you here, this is what is supposed to inspire you to design.

The message here is that there are two kinds of architecture- architecture for architects and architecture for everyone else. The reality of the situation is that for the vast majority of architects, the most radical design they will ever do is in school (iconic, theoretical architecture in iconic, theoretical buildings) and the vast majority of architecture they will produce in their careers is the architecture for everyone else (gimme a retail box, and make it look like a Spanish hacienda!). But hey, its already a given that architecture school is not about the real world- I've accepted and eventually welcomed the fact that it is not a professional prep school.