I thought Paul's posting of this news item was worth its own thread.
You know, we talk about architecture school almost constantly, and we talk about design all the time.....but I can't remember a quality discussion about the design of the actual buildings housing the architecture schools.
That article really struck a chord with me since it talks about the DAAP building at UC. It was glorious when it opened, but now it's a maintenance nightmare.
Anybody else want to share any design criticisms or praise for the buildings where they spent their formative years?
Well, I think that's the point of the article though. Even when architecture schools get their very own "starchitect-designed" building, they don't perform well. Peter Eisenmann designed DAAP....and now, 11 years later, it's a piece of CRAAP (sorry, I couldn't help myself).
Anyway, I'm up way too late, I'm counting on the east coasters (and jump!) to take it from here....
actually i didn't realise how good my school was in canada til i came to tokyo and got to enjoy the beaux artes era building on campus at u of tokyo. now we are moved and in a sort of hyper utilitarian building that i am still not ready to actually like. of the three the canadian one still seems the best to me...
the u of manitoba building was done in proper miesian style which is kinda weird for snowbound winnipeg, but aprt from the cladding for a cold climate issues (which were severe) the functionality was lovely. cuz it was bauhaus inspired it was open plan and democratically arranged (no hierarchy of spatial quality for teachers versus dean versus staff and students sorta thing)...but best thing was all the faculties fit onto a single floor with only simple dividers between us. which was fantastic for seeing what was going on in all the grades and faculties.
at u of tokyo the professors each have their own lab room and hierarchy and segregation of each level of educator and educatee is very clear. which is nice in some ways, but since there are only 10 or 15 students in each lab we never see what the other profs or students are up to and it just isn't a welcoming place at all for students. the experience has convinced me the bauhausians had it right and the neo-classical-ians are full of rubbish.
i actually dont know much about our building, except that it was designed to be a sort of living lesson in itself. Lots of exposed structural stuff, variety of materials
when it comes to SOA's i'd rather take a more conservative approach, although when i was in mine, i'd wish for a more flamboyant building reflective of the creative endeavor. i think if i ever became a member of a building committee, i'd prefer to spend the money on infrastructure - technology, quality library, excellent building facilities, and quality spaces for student life....
our building at tulane was built as part of the medical school. it was one of those buildings that can do anything: tripartite, two large undifferentiated three-story wings for the studios. the huge central stair is where everyone hung out. built around the turn of the 20thC in the richardsonian romanesque style. perfect.
the building at university of kentucky is similar, though a little less flexible. and they've outgrown it, so have a few annexes in other buildings. will be adding-on sometime soon. we'll see what they get!
The A+A building just gets better and better the more time you spend living in it. When I was there it was basically an occupied ruin, it's so complicated that it reads kind of like the building Steven's talking about above, as though it were originally intended for some other function, but then was repurposed as a design school. The thing with the A+A, though, is that it's so strange you'll never figure out what that imaginary purpose was ... 10th century castle? Alien embassy from a planet with higher gravity? The best spaces are the ones that are technically off-limits: the back exit stair, the roof, the extra 5th floor bathroom, the strange warren of locked rooms off the darkroom ... and then there's this huge underground part that extends beneath Chapel Street for like the library offices or something, it shows up in the drawings and no one has access but the librarians.
The A+A is first on my list of places to occupy and fortify in the event of the apocalypse.
jump, i had similar experiences at IIT. Don't know what the connection is, but Crown Hall was probably looked at as a precedent. So, all the same good things as jump said above. The building allows you to travel around, see what other studios are doing, blow off some steam with some sprints or hackeysack. It's a cool venue for open house, though typically they haven't done it very tastefully in years past.
The energy issue is both a problem and a benefit, back when ugrad years were 50-60 students, the students progressed from the SW corner to the NE corner... talk about heirarchy. you'll learn more about solar orientation when you're sweating as a freshmen in that SW corner over your desk. It blew. Of course now the classes are huge, and I think 3rd year and most of the elective studios are no longer in Crown.
Then there's the disaster that is the "wiring" of Crown.
...but it still has my favorite stalls of all time.
I've also visited UIC's studio, GSD Studio, Columbia's architecture building and am curious to hear what others say about it. I liked Gund's setup, seemed to give the best of a couple of worlds, interactive, lively, but a bit segregated... seems like they need more space... where do the crits happen? UIC and Columbia had that dungeon quality about them, which I'm sure has some merits.
it's funny this came up because i was just thinking about it.
no offense to anyone at u of houston, but your building is, well, ugly. i just went to visit the campus this past weekend. driving up to it - i was thinking "man, that's a really boring building. i wonder if it's the arch building." and, of course, it was.
odds are the pic won't work since i've never gotten a pic to work (if someone could explain what the hell i'm doing wrong, i'd appreciate it.) Here's the link if it doesn't work.
i wouldn't say the architecture building at georgia tech was superb, but i do have to say it felt more inviting than walking into that building.
i think the most interesting arch building i occupied was Ecole d’Architecture de Paris la Villette. it wasn't originally an arch building, but it had a lot of interesting elements, congregating spaces. my only complaint is that there were too many closed off rooms which led to less interaction.
of the schools i've visited, i thought the building at university of miami ohio seemed like a great facility. i'm not usually a fan of thomas beeby (e.g., chicago's washington library), but this project is a good one.
risd, in the late 80s, was one of those beat-up but comfortable buildings. students seemed more separated from each other than i prefer, but maybe i just missed the 'mixing' spaces.
cincinnati's daap, besides the building's construction issues that wonderk mentioned, has a great central mixing space. the studio spaces seemed pretty good as well. my major issue was the connecting tissue: the circulation is a nightmare, both from a personal orientation standpoint and a qualitative standpoint. being lost in white drywall corridors is NOT pleasant. they must have value-engineered out the way-finding consultant.
florida int'l in miami, the one recently done by tschumi, wasn't bad. looks absolutely stunning. it's sort of just a simple plan diagram formed in concrete decorated with colored tile, but it appears to work pretty well. tschumi depends a lot on the ability to circulate outdoors in miami's weather which in the very hot or very stormy times might be a bad decision. can you imagine carrying a big museum board model through a squall along an outdoor walkway? if you assume it's always sunny, the outdoor walks and review spaces seem great. studios had a lot of glass - pleasant views out but limits wall space and makes for high heat loads. floridians aren't afraid of over-air-conditioning, luckily. i hear there is a shortage of review wall space.
haven't visited rotondi's prairie view texas school but it LOOKS like it would be a very good facility from what i've seen published. anybody there that can comment?
Back in the late 80s the architecture studios at MIT were filled - I mean, filled to bursting - with student-built desk surrounds: lofts, shelving, reading nooks, low walls, high walls, suspensions...all built out of salvaged materials. It was a crazy hamster-maze of design and material investigations.
To me, it seemed like the ultimate perfect place to study architecture.
Then it was all pulled down, I think due to fire code issues, of which there were no doubt plenty.
ah, well, i obviously don't know my architects too well... it's interesting though because when i did some research on arch before going to houston - not once was that mentioned.
before the p. johnson architecture building at univ. of houston, the architecture studios were in a simple, 1-storey metal construction, that was a 'temporry' structure - for about 25 years.
but it was a superb space for working, as it was more warehouse than office, rough and ready, flexible and open, could take lots of abuse and still just look like a place to do work in. no pretense.
as a consequence, some very good work was produced in the '70s.
as soon as the johnson building was up and running, the quality of work declined. i think there was a direct cause and effect.
on the whole, i think architecture buildings should NOT be interesting and certainly not innovative. they should be a background for possible work. too much thought or too much style and they become a detriment to to possible futures of the school - which may well not be the same as those proposed by the building.
Wasn't there a 'show us your architecture school studio space' thread a while back? I just hunted and couldn't find it ...
My undergrad school, UMD, also had a latemodernist/semibrutalist brick and concrete buildng. I remember we used to look at the proportions and imagine Golden Sections everywhere. It's a code that only architects can read! Far out!
i completely disagree.
if any building should be innovative and on the forefront it should
be the architecture school. the key would be to make it also
adaptable to future use/reuse...but what better environment to
learn in than a well designed building? to actually spend a lot of
time in close proximity to good details and craft? it'd be a lesson
in and of itself.
has anyone gone to osu and their school out there?
the only restriction i would put on architecture schools is that they
shouldn't be pristine. the creative process in school (in my mind)
is inherently messy and cleaning is a waste of time...not to say
that it should be a pig sty...but they should definitely not be
pristine white boxes either.
oh yeah, i forgot i visited sci-arc too. but there are plenty of others that could comment on that more fully. our visit was nice; loved the library space, though it seemed .... empty.
Aw, now DubK is on the west coast schedule.....and since you're a student and don't have to get up for work, you'll be getting started even later....it's practically lunchtime for me....
Oh well, I guess I'll adjust to the new things, everyone else is!
On topic: I agree with lars that arch schools need to be able to get messy, take abuse, be used for experimentation and play. That must be why I thought MIT's were so great.
On that note, Cranbrook's is excellent: big industrial space for making things, but the studios neatly arranged in two rows and very open so you could see what everyone else was building. And, of course, it's by Saarinen. Every brick was a lesson.
MN has an architecture building named after an architect, Ralph Rapson Hall. Although the name was changed to that in his honor for being dean all those years. The new Holl wing is ok, but the older building appears much more functional.
hmmm, what to say about Watt Hall? It's wasn't toooo horrible to look at, but had some major functional problems. At the time I went there there were only two stories and the basement, and the stair that went from first to basement was outside (and needed to be sandbagged when it rained!), but the stiar that went from first to second was inside. So far too many people took the elevator to go only two floors, because this arrangement somehow encouraged laziness due to the lack of flow. The air conditioner became hyperactive in some spaces, nonexistant in others, and somehow sucked all the smokey air from the bridge between the architecture building and the art building right into the third year studios, which frequently made me sick. We called first year studios "the dungeon" because they are in the basement with only a row of extremely high clerestories for natural light. Apparently there used to be a big atrium in the middle which older people always said made the building much nicer, that got filled in with galleries when they needed more space. These galleries had the worst sound quality imaginable, as they were encased in glass. Then there was the space problem that drove 2 or 3 topic studios off campus every semester!
OK, but after all this whining, they've now added another story to the building, pulled all the off-campus studios back on campus, and added an outdoor staircase that connects with one of the bridges to the art building, all of which seems to make things quite a bit better (maybe DubK can confirm or deny this?). They got someone decent to design it, Christof Kapellar who was one of the big guys with Snohetta when they did the Alexandria Library, and I can't help but lament the difference between the schematic and what actually ended up getting built. It's pretty good as it got built, well planned particularly, but a lot of the beauty got lost in the process.
man i keep remembering having visited these places! shows my age. and the magnetic draw that architecture schools have on me whenever i'm within driving distance.
minnesota's school, before the holl addition, WAS very functional, if crowded. the central clerestory court was a wonderful place for reviews, longer displays, and a good site for 'intervention' projects. the library was not so hot, so it's good holl's addition included a newer more accommodating one.
vado, is that predock's unm in albuquerque? i visited unm just before that broke ground. the school was in 2-3 adjacent buildings, all with a good layer of route 66 funk. i don't know which was the furniture store, but they WERE pretty rough. the displays of sculpture in the outdoor spaces were nice...
hey as long as the architecture school has a studio with windows the outside world, a workshop with cutting tools and a bar/alcohol selling snackette I'm good to go. I went to a school with 2/3 but it was still all good
yes thats unm with lots of southern and western glass which should make for some fine blinding moments with the perpetual new mexico sunshine blasting its way in.
we had beer bashes in open space on friday's. very nice. also a few amateur concerts, which was fun. other than that no permanent alcohol.
our studio space was pretty much as lb described above. the open space was reconstructured and organised by students with scraps. some made mezanines space, others had doors. most just made a mess. which is necessary when student i think.
First couple of years our studios were in an old barrel vaulted gymnasium. It was awesomely messy with pigeons and catwalks overhead. We shared the building with ROTC and Campus Safety, there were bleachers you could climb to look down over the studio's short walls, sometimes the ROTC would run up and down the bleachers counting and making all sorts of noise. The studios were easy to wander thru and let loose in. We were crazy messy one semester, building installations all over for studio, and the fire marshall freaked out (blocked exits, piles of found objects students had hauled in, hazardous materials, etc) and it has cleaned up since then. When the alumni association calls me and asks me for money to get the students out of that space into something "nicer", I say NO WAY! I thought it was cool.
The last couple of years they put you in a 5 story glass and concrete atruim building. The studios are secluded, individula rooms that are impossible to "wander", the atrium is awkwardly narrow, and, well, it was a rectangle barrel dome on top of a parrallelogram building leaving awkward triangles at the ends, oh and the office windows are lined with tin foil on the south side. Neither building had a lecture hall (till recently) so non-studio classes were given in various buildings throughout campus. Can't find a picture right now. You're not missing anything.
the architecture department at cranbrook used to be in the basement of the library.
nothing special in terms of the space or the details, but it suited well as a working space. it was the least "designed" space of all the cranbrook studios. being on the cranbrook campus meant an immersion in Saarinen details and design. so in response to larslarson, this was a mix of a neutral architectural studio and access to exquisite detailing - without ever confusing the two.
hejduk's cooper union succeeds in much the same way, with the architecture studios being fairly straight forward, but the rest of the building offering direct contact with thoughtful architectural intent. having reviews in the main lobbies, with lifts opening and closing all the time, is not the most conducive of review spaces, but it does put the work out in the open.
I would have much rather have gone to school in a concrete block building which we could have beaten the crap out (with models, large stuff, etc) than the DAAP building which was a fragile piece of shit from day 1
i was in the first class at sci-arc to be in the marina del rey building - a simple grey 60,000sf concrete tilt-up next door to a home depot and the baywatch production facility. perfectly suited to being the subject and
vehicle for many experiments.
unm's new arch building is based heavily upon the MdR SCI-Arc facility btw...
It’s a shame that such an architecturally beautiful campus such as Cincinnati’s with works of Mayne, Gehry, and Graves, you’d think that the Architecture building would follow in suit!
I've actually never seen Knowlton before, it looks quite nice.
And DAAP was such a disappointment. I remember coming in at 17 and thinking it was the coolest thing to have this bizarro new building that everyone was ooohing and aaahing over. The next 3 years changed my opinion of it drastically and by the time I was a 6th-year, I was happy to be in the more industrial-style senior studio that was part of the "old" building that the Eisenmann addition connected to. After I graduated and drove past the building on a regular basis, it seemed to deteriorate each year. Now it looks like somebody dumped buckets of mud onto the walls from the roof....it's dirty and ugly and falling apart. Talk about a case study in why EIFS shouldn't be used. I think if I ever meet Eisenmann I may slap him in the face.
So, rationalist mentioned Watt Hall, which I am in now....there's a 3rd floor addition that she never got to enjoy, and I must say that when I was deciding where to go to grad school, this space factored into the equation. It's quite nice, with open studio space for all the grad students, faculty offices on the perimeter and public balconies in between the offices. The daylighting is incredible, to the point where the fluorescent uplights on the big columns seem useless. I think my only criticism of it so far is the lack of sound separation.....I think the space could benefit from at least some movable walls for seminars or meetings. But, the whole thing is concrete, glass and metal, so I see it outlasting DAAP by a long shot.....
i like waterloo's re-use of an old silk mill adjacent the river
i also like the aho's re-use of an industrial building adjacent the akerselva river
i guess i have a think for adaptive re-use adjacent rivers
it kills me that none of the local michigan schools have moved into detroit and set up shop in one of the many available vacant buildings...maybe i should start my own arch school in detroit similar to the old sci-arc. we could call it the detroit institute of architecture or maybe just di-arc for short
the DESIGN of architecture schools
I thought Paul's posting of this news item was worth its own thread.
You know, we talk about architecture school almost constantly, and we talk about design all the time.....but I can't remember a quality discussion about the design of the actual buildings housing the architecture schools.
That article really struck a chord with me since it talks about the DAAP building at UC. It was glorious when it opened, but now it's a maintenance nightmare.
Anybody else want to share any design criticisms or praise for the buildings where they spent their formative years?
we ain't gots no money so we can't donate so we don't get nice bldgs. :-(
when's the last time you saw [architect's name] Hall on any campus??
Well, I think that's the point of the article though. Even when architecture schools get their very own "starchitect-designed" building, they don't perform well. Peter Eisenmann designed DAAP....and now, 11 years later, it's a piece of CRAAP (sorry, I couldn't help myself).
Anyway, I'm up way too late, I'm counting on the east coasters (and jump!) to take it from here....
oh alright...
actually i didn't realise how good my school was in canada til i came to tokyo and got to enjoy the beaux artes era building on campus at u of tokyo. now we are moved and in a sort of hyper utilitarian building that i am still not ready to actually like. of the three the canadian one still seems the best to me...
the u of manitoba building was done in proper miesian style which is kinda weird for snowbound winnipeg, but aprt from the cladding for a cold climate issues (which were severe) the functionality was lovely. cuz it was bauhaus inspired it was open plan and democratically arranged (no hierarchy of spatial quality for teachers versus dean versus staff and students sorta thing)...but best thing was all the faculties fit onto a single floor with only simple dividers between us. which was fantastic for seeing what was going on in all the grades and faculties.
at u of tokyo the professors each have their own lab room and hierarchy and segregation of each level of educator and educatee is very clear. which is nice in some ways, but since there are only 10 or 15 students in each lab we never see what the other profs or students are up to and it just isn't a welcoming place at all for students. the experience has convinced me the bauhausians had it right and the neo-classical-ians are full of rubbish.
or something like that.
i actually dont know much about our building, except that it was designed to be a sort of living lesson in itself. Lots of exposed structural stuff, variety of materials
when it comes to SOA's i'd rather take a more conservative approach, although when i was in mine, i'd wish for a more flamboyant building reflective of the creative endeavor. i think if i ever became a member of a building committee, i'd prefer to spend the money on infrastructure - technology, quality library, excellent building facilities, and quality spaces for student life....
our building at tulane was built as part of the medical school. it was one of those buildings that can do anything: tripartite, two large undifferentiated three-story wings for the studios. the huge central stair is where everyone hung out. built around the turn of the 20thC in the richardsonian romanesque style. perfect.
the building at university of kentucky is similar, though a little less flexible. and they've outgrown it, so have a few annexes in other buildings. will be adding-on sometime soon. we'll see what they get!
The A+A building just gets better and better the more time you spend living in it. When I was there it was basically an occupied ruin, it's so complicated that it reads kind of like the building Steven's talking about above, as though it were originally intended for some other function, but then was repurposed as a design school. The thing with the A+A, though, is that it's so strange you'll never figure out what that imaginary purpose was ... 10th century castle? Alien embassy from a planet with higher gravity? The best spaces are the ones that are technically off-limits: the back exit stair, the roof, the extra 5th floor bathroom, the strange warren of locked rooms off the darkroom ... and then there's this huge underground part that extends beneath Chapel Street for like the library offices or something, it shows up in the drawings and no one has access but the librarians.
The A+A is first on my list of places to occupy and fortify in the event of the apocalypse.
765, interesting post...
jump, i had similar experiences at IIT. Don't know what the connection is, but Crown Hall was probably looked at as a precedent. So, all the same good things as jump said above. The building allows you to travel around, see what other studios are doing, blow off some steam with some sprints or hackeysack. It's a cool venue for open house, though typically they haven't done it very tastefully in years past.
The energy issue is both a problem and a benefit, back when ugrad years were 50-60 students, the students progressed from the SW corner to the NE corner... talk about heirarchy. you'll learn more about solar orientation when you're sweating as a freshmen in that SW corner over your desk. It blew. Of course now the classes are huge, and I think 3rd year and most of the elective studios are no longer in Crown.
Then there's the disaster that is the "wiring" of Crown.
...but it still has my favorite stalls of all time.
I've also visited UIC's studio, GSD Studio, Columbia's architecture building and am curious to hear what others say about it. I liked Gund's setup, seemed to give the best of a couple of worlds, interactive, lively, but a bit segregated... seems like they need more space... where do the crits happen? UIC and Columbia had that dungeon quality about them, which I'm sure has some merits.
it's funny this came up because i was just thinking about it.
no offense to anyone at u of houston, but your building is, well, ugly. i just went to visit the campus this past weekend. driving up to it - i was thinking "man, that's a really boring building. i wonder if it's the arch building." and, of course, it was.
odds are the pic won't work since i've never gotten a pic to work (if someone could explain what the hell i'm doing wrong, i'd appreciate it.) Here's the link if it doesn't work.
University of Houston
i wouldn't say the architecture building at georgia tech was superb, but i do have to say it felt more inviting than walking into that building.
i think the most interesting arch building i occupied was Ecole d’Architecture de Paris la Villette. it wasn't originally an arch building, but it had a lot of interesting elements, congregating spaces. my only complaint is that there were too many closed off rooms which led to less interaction.
woohoo! the pic worked! now i just need to learn resizing.
of the schools i've visited, i thought the building at university of miami ohio seemed like a great facility. i'm not usually a fan of thomas beeby (e.g., chicago's washington library), but this project is a good one.
risd, in the late 80s, was one of those beat-up but comfortable buildings. students seemed more separated from each other than i prefer, but maybe i just missed the 'mixing' spaces.
cincinnati's daap, besides the building's construction issues that wonderk mentioned, has a great central mixing space. the studio spaces seemed pretty good as well. my major issue was the connecting tissue: the circulation is a nightmare, both from a personal orientation standpoint and a qualitative standpoint. being lost in white drywall corridors is NOT pleasant. they must have value-engineered out the way-finding consultant.
florida int'l in miami, the one recently done by tschumi, wasn't bad. looks absolutely stunning. it's sort of just a simple plan diagram formed in concrete decorated with colored tile, but it appears to work pretty well. tschumi depends a lot on the ability to circulate outdoors in miami's weather which in the very hot or very stormy times might be a bad decision. can you imagine carrying a big museum board model through a squall along an outdoor walkway? if you assume it's always sunny, the outdoor walks and review spaces seem great. studios had a lot of glass - pleasant views out but limits wall space and makes for high heat loads. floridians aren't afraid of over-air-conditioning, luckily. i hear there is a shortage of review wall space.
haven't visited rotondi's prairie view texas school but it LOOKS like it would be a very good facility from what i've seen published. anybody there that can comment?
houston's 'boring' building, it should be noted, is by philip johnson who was ripping off ledoux.
Back in the late 80s the architecture studios at MIT were filled - I mean, filled to bursting - with student-built desk surrounds: lofts, shelving, reading nooks, low walls, high walls, suspensions...all built out of salvaged materials. It was a crazy hamster-maze of design and material investigations.
To me, it seemed like the ultimate perfect place to study architecture.
Then it was all pulled down, I think due to fire code issues, of which there were no doubt plenty.
ah, well, i obviously don't know my architects too well... it's interesting though because when i did some research on arch before going to houston - not once was that mentioned.
before the p. johnson architecture building at univ. of houston, the architecture studios were in a simple, 1-storey metal construction, that was a 'temporry' structure - for about 25 years.
but it was a superb space for working, as it was more warehouse than office, rough and ready, flexible and open, could take lots of abuse and still just look like a place to do work in. no pretense.
as a consequence, some very good work was produced in the '70s.
as soon as the johnson building was up and running, the quality of work declined. i think there was a direct cause and effect.
on the whole, i think architecture buildings should NOT be interesting and certainly not innovative. they should be a background for possible work. too much thought or too much style and they become a detriment to to possible futures of the school - which may well not be the same as those proposed by the building.
UIC has that parking garage quality to it
Wasn't there a 'show us your architecture school studio space' thread a while back? I just hunted and couldn't find it ...
My undergrad school, UMD, also had a latemodernist/semibrutalist brick and concrete buildng. I remember we used to look at the proportions and imagine Golden Sections everywhere. It's a code that only architects can read! Far out!
dlb
i completely disagree.
if any building should be innovative and on the forefront it should
be the architecture school. the key would be to make it also
adaptable to future use/reuse...but what better environment to
learn in than a well designed building? to actually spend a lot of
time in close proximity to good details and craft? it'd be a lesson
in and of itself.
has anyone gone to osu and their school out there?
the only restriction i would put on architecture schools is that they
shouldn't be pristine. the creative process in school (in my mind)
is inherently messy and cleaning is a waste of time...not to say
that it should be a pig sty...but they should definitely not be
pristine white boxes either.
Woo hoo! I love waking up to lots of comments. Later, I will post something of actual value.
Good job team.....
oh yeah, i forgot i visited sci-arc too. but there are plenty of others that could comment on that more fully. our visit was nice; loved the library space, though it seemed .... empty.
Aw, now DubK is on the west coast schedule.....and since you're a student and don't have to get up for work, you'll be getting started even later....it's practically lunchtime for me....
Oh well, I guess I'll adjust to the new things, everyone else is!
On topic: I agree with lars that arch schools need to be able to get messy, take abuse, be used for experimentation and play. That must be why I thought MIT's were so great.
On that note, Cranbrook's is excellent: big industrial space for making things, but the studios neatly arranged in two rows and very open so you could see what everyone else was building. And, of course, it's by Saarinen. Every brick was a lesson.
MN has an architecture building named after an architect, Ralph Rapson Hall. Although the name was changed to that in his honor for being dean all those years. The new Holl wing is ok, but the older building appears much more functional.
hmmm, what to say about Watt Hall? It's wasn't toooo horrible to look at, but had some major functional problems. At the time I went there there were only two stories and the basement, and the stair that went from first to basement was outside (and needed to be sandbagged when it rained!), but the stiar that went from first to second was inside. So far too many people took the elevator to go only two floors, because this arrangement somehow encouraged laziness due to the lack of flow. The air conditioner became hyperactive in some spaces, nonexistant in others, and somehow sucked all the smokey air from the bridge between the architecture building and the art building right into the third year studios, which frequently made me sick. We called first year studios "the dungeon" because they are in the basement with only a row of extremely high clerestories for natural light. Apparently there used to be a big atrium in the middle which older people always said made the building much nicer, that got filled in with galleries when they needed more space. These galleries had the worst sound quality imaginable, as they were encased in glass. Then there was the space problem that drove 2 or 3 topic studios off campus every semester!
OK, but after all this whining, they've now added another story to the building, pulled all the off-campus studios back on campus, and added an outdoor staircase that connects with one of the bridges to the art building, all of which seems to make things quite a bit better (maybe DubK can confirm or deny this?). They got someone decent to design it, Christof Kapellar who was one of the big guys with Snohetta when they did the Alexandria Library, and I can't help but lament the difference between the schematic and what actually ended up getting built. It's pretty good as it got built, well planned particularly, but a lot of the beauty got lost in the process.
lets see when i was there the architecture school was in a former furniture store. this is the new one...
man i keep remembering having visited these places! shows my age. and the magnetic draw that architecture schools have on me whenever i'm within driving distance.
minnesota's school, before the holl addition, WAS very functional, if crowded. the central clerestory court was a wonderful place for reviews, longer displays, and a good site for 'intervention' projects. the library was not so hot, so it's good holl's addition included a newer more accommodating one.
vado, is that predock's unm in albuquerque? i visited unm just before that broke ground. the school was in 2-3 adjacent buildings, all with a good layer of route 66 funk. i don't know which was the furniture store, but they WERE pretty rough. the displays of sculpture in the outdoor spaces were nice...
hey as long as the architecture school has a studio with windows the outside world, a workshop with cutting tools and a bar/alcohol selling snackette I'm good to go. I went to a school with 2/3 but it was still all good
yes thats unm with lots of southern and western glass which should make for some fine blinding moments with the perpetual new mexico sunshine blasting its way in.
we had beer bashes in open space on friday's. very nice. also a few amateur concerts, which was fun. other than that no permanent alcohol.
our studio space was pretty much as lb described above. the open space was reconstructured and organised by students with scraps. some made mezanines space, others had doors. most just made a mess. which is necessary when student i think.
what do you guys think of the Syracuse (SOA) "The Warehouse"?
Well, here's a picture of the TTU monstrosity:
Here are some pictures from a school blog a few years back.
Frel's blog
And here's an over-all of the beast:
Ugly, confusing, uber-utilitarian. Everyone here hates it with the burning, white hot anger of 10,000 suns.
that's a big ass pile of bricks. it is embarrassing for an architecture school to have a building that doesn't reflect its values as an institution.
Well, the bricks are a nice break from all the drab concrete walls with exposed aggregate that overwhelm the interior.
I went to school in this rented industrial building. We didn't have any heat but we were happy...
orhan, are you in that bottom picture?
i am more to the right behind jerry. you don't see me.
i hope you were sporting one of those groovy beards, or at least a handle bar mustache.
i know what you mean. i finally shaved after 3b...
First couple of years our studios were in an old barrel vaulted gymnasium. It was awesomely messy with pigeons and catwalks overhead. We shared the building with ROTC and Campus Safety, there were bleachers you could climb to look down over the studio's short walls, sometimes the ROTC would run up and down the bleachers counting and making all sorts of noise. The studios were easy to wander thru and let loose in. We were crazy messy one semester, building installations all over for studio, and the fire marshall freaked out (blocked exits, piles of found objects students had hauled in, hazardous materials, etc) and it has cleaned up since then. When the alumni association calls me and asks me for money to get the students out of that space into something "nicer", I say NO WAY! I thought it was cool.
The last couple of years they put you in a 5 story glass and concrete atruim building. The studios are secluded, individula rooms that are impossible to "wander", the atrium is awkwardly narrow, and, well, it was a rectangle barrel dome on top of a parrallelogram building leaving awkward triangles at the ends, oh and the office windows are lined with tin foil on the south side. Neither building had a lecture hall (till recently) so non-studio classes were given in various buildings throughout campus. Can't find a picture right now. You're not missing anything.
strawbeary, where's that gymnasium at? looks familiar
eastcoaster, it is at iowa state
the architecture department at cranbrook used to be in the basement of the library.
nothing special in terms of the space or the details, but it suited well as a working space. it was the least "designed" space of all the cranbrook studios. being on the cranbrook campus meant an immersion in Saarinen details and design. so in response to larslarson, this was a mix of a neutral architectural studio and access to exquisite detailing - without ever confusing the two.
hejduk's cooper union succeeds in much the same way, with the architecture studios being fairly straight forward, but the rest of the building offering direct contact with thoughtful architectural intent. having reviews in the main lobbies, with lifts opening and closing all the time, is not the most conducive of review spaces, but it does put the work out in the open.
[img]
http://knowlton.osu.edu/images/background/knowlton13.jpg width=300[/img]
Knowlton School of Architecture at the Ohio State University, Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects
I got lucky, this is the newest building on campus. Plenty of concrete and glass, but it's very open and is a very useful space.
dubK
I would have much rather have gone to school in a concrete block building which we could have beaten the crap out (with models, large stuff, etc) than the DAAP building which was a fragile piece of shit from day 1
orhan
from what Tony has told me, you guys were all so high back in the day at SciArc that heat really wasnt an issue
my old boss always said that piano would probably be a great guy to do a starchitect architecture school that would actually work...
i was in the first class at sci-arc to be in the marina del rey building - a simple grey 60,000sf concrete tilt-up next door to a home depot and the baywatch production facility. perfectly suited to being the subject and
vehicle for many experiments.
unm's new arch building is based heavily upon the MdR SCI-Arc facility btw...
this is the DAAP building you speak of
It’s a shame that such an architecturally beautiful campus such as Cincinnati’s with works of Mayne, Gehry, and Graves, you’d think that the Architecture building would follow in suit!
eastcoastarch> yep, that's it.
I've actually never seen Knowlton before, it looks quite nice.
And DAAP was such a disappointment. I remember coming in at 17 and thinking it was the coolest thing to have this bizarro new building that everyone was ooohing and aaahing over. The next 3 years changed my opinion of it drastically and by the time I was a 6th-year, I was happy to be in the more industrial-style senior studio that was part of the "old" building that the Eisenmann addition connected to. After I graduated and drove past the building on a regular basis, it seemed to deteriorate each year. Now it looks like somebody dumped buckets of mud onto the walls from the roof....it's dirty and ugly and falling apart. Talk about a case study in why EIFS shouldn't be used. I think if I ever meet Eisenmann I may slap him in the face.
So, rationalist mentioned Watt Hall, which I am in now....there's a 3rd floor addition that she never got to enjoy, and I must say that when I was deciding where to go to grad school, this space factored into the equation. It's quite nice, with open studio space for all the grad students, faculty offices on the perimeter and public balconies in between the offices. The daylighting is incredible, to the point where the fluorescent uplights on the big columns seem useless. I think my only criticism of it so far is the lack of sound separation.....I think the space could benefit from at least some movable walls for seminars or meetings. But, the whole thing is concrete, glass and metal, so I see it outlasting DAAP by a long shot.....
Watt Hall:
i like waterloo's re-use of an old silk mill adjacent the river
i also like the aho's re-use of an industrial building adjacent the akerselva river
i guess i have a think for adaptive re-use adjacent rivers
it kills me that none of the local michigan schools have moved into detroit and set up shop in one of the many available vacant buildings...maybe i should start my own arch school in detroit similar to the old sci-arc. we could call it the detroit institute of architecture or maybe just di-arc for short
Eisenman is a shitty architect
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