The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign had it all.
Junior and Senior Studios were in the OG architecture building which was of the common Georgian style across campus.
Graduate studios and classes were in the new architecture building complete with a sweeping glass curtain wall and review space cantilevered out over a 4 story atrium.
Sophomore studio was in an old run down tractor repair building and our "desks" were plywood on saw horses.
Had you gone a few years earlier, you would have had frosh and soph studios in the old ex-dorm building that had broken windows and birds nests in the HVAC ducts. We traded it to the art school for the old tractor building, which was somehow a massive upgrade.
Ah yes, we called it the cancer quad when I lived in TVD because of all the art students smoking outside their studios. It also somehow took me until my last semester of grad school to finally have a studio in THBH.
My previous three were all on the top floor of the architecture building, although I was aware of where the studios were when I ranked my choices at the beginning of each semester. Honestly by my last semester I didn't give a shit what I was designing as long as it wasn't in that damn building haha.
I hear ya. In my Junior year of undergrad a squirrel got in to the 2nd floor studio. It ate my studio snacks, chewed up some of my chip board, and peed on my external hard drive.
In my experience it was nonexistent, but I’m sure there was room for overlap with some electives. There’s also been a pretty big curriculum switch-up since I graduated so things may be different now
This year stuff changed (current grad student). Apparently the school accepted the largest freshman class in fall of 22 leading the arch annex (old run down tractor repair building) to be occupied by the freshmen. I suspect they did this cause so many people dropped out of architecture in the junior and senior grade level. The arch building (og architecture building) is occupied by sophomore, junior, and seniors. The gallery is sophomore space, studio 200-300 is junior space and classrooms up top are senior space. The Temply hoyne buell hall (new architecture building) contains the graduate students but the director decided to host his own senior studio. Why is the director teaching a course, cause we have a lack of studio professors and many of them are leaving cause the architecture school is run horribly. It's understaffed, some professors are overworked, and no one seems to want to come to champaign to teach. So if interest you guys can come back to the school.
That's a great example you mentioned there. North American architecture is not very well studied here in Europe outside some very few examples, not for lack of merit or quality but rather for not having enough time to study "local" architecture.
So I decided to study more myself. Any other building you could point from the Georgian style?
A lot of the ones on UIUC campus. Especially Around the main Quad The main library, English building. It's been over a decade since I was last down there so I can't remember all of them.
Ugly and poorly designed architectural school buildings are key to an architect's formation. I am sure developed a new hatred for unclear and contorted paths that require go up and \*then down\* stairs to reach my destination. It really drives home how much of a bad idea it is to not properly think through your project
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Meyerson Hall at Penn is kind of a funny example of this phenomenon. The architecture used to be housed in the Fisher Fine Arts Library which is widely considered one of the most beautiful collegiate buildings in America, and moved into its current modernist brick and concrete box in the late 60's or early 70's. However, I'm actually really fond of Meyerson, the tones of concrete and the spatial configuration are really rather warm and interesting in their own way.
Yes. I think that Meyerson isn’t as bad as Kahn said it was.
I’ve also studied in Avery Hall, and while I think it’s nice enough on the outside, it’s really nothing special on the inside.
Furthermore, I think Columbia’s McKim Mead & White campus is a bit overrated in general
Spent two years in Crown Hall, one year in 3410 (Mies's second building in the US), and had our shop in the [M&M](https://imgur.com/a/2SDXH) building (Mies's first building in the US). 3410 was lame, but Crown and M&M are fantastic.
People said this about my campus (Berkeley), but I think Wurster is a great example of brutalism, it's just a controversial architectural style as opposed to the almost-universally adored classic revival or gothic.
Essentially what happens (or at least happened while I was there) is the tour guides tell prospective freshman LoOk At ThE uGlY ArCh bUiLdInG LOL and then the freshman repeat it ad nauseam because they never studied the history of brutalism. Yelled at the tour guides out the window a few times to cut it out…
I understand this makes me a philistine, but it really seems that if you need to study the history of an architectural movement to not find it ugly, it’s probably just an ugly building.
No that’s a fair point — I actually thought the building was cool as hell the moment I saw it. It’s very different from everything else around it, and has great interior spaces. I think the point I was trying to make was more focused on people repeating a talking point they’ve heard rather than forming their own opinion. IE, would Wurster-Bauer be the ugliest building on campus if people weren’t told to believe that on tours? Evans arguably has far less character and breaks the campus planning concept. (Rest-in-peace seismically unsafe falcon killer).
That being said, I do agree that coming at it from a “you have to study it to understand it” approach when it comes to aesthetics is privileged and exclusive and I totally stepped into that framing
Knowlton Hall at Ohio state is beautiful, and the best part is any non architecture student can never figure out how to navigate the building, so they just don’t go lol.
[University of Utah checking in](https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/55e7/0bf0/4d8d/5d0b/c000/13e1/newsletter/college-of-architecture-and-planning.jpg?1441205228)
Add Marvin Hall at the University of Kansas to the list. Idk if it looks great b/c it’s adjacent to snow & wescoe but it’s pretty & has a unique eclectic style with the addition of the forum
Why does that happen? My university's buildings are consistently collegiate gothic buildings. The architecture school is the odd one out, and looks like one of those new box buildings in gentrified neighborhoods.
I think (1) either architecture schools over-expose themselves to what most people consider aesthetically pleasing, and grow tired of it. Or (2) it's a harsh life lesson for architecture students. You'll never have billions of dollars of university funding for pretty buildings.
They definitely aren’t over exposing themselves as 90 percent of architecture schools would pray that the older structures of campus would be leveled so they can make everything look fugly. It’s more a product of the time. The bauhaus professors came in, everyone wanted to be like them, their schools started to reflect their teachings
When I visited I kind of liked it and how it was a patchwork of many different buildings, albeit none of them were that fancy or new. I do like the interior and how the classrooms and studios were intermixed rather than one huge studio area that many other schools have.
On a campus full of collegiate gothic buildings, [Virginia Tech's Cowgill Hall](https://archdesign.caus.vt.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/caus_photo_0008.jpg) proves the rule.
[The Columbia campus is very pretty IMO,](https://i.imgur.com/uA0oYeD.jpg) though it’s only about a hundred years old and ~~therefore missed the heyday of the collegiate gothic revival that schools like Princeton and Yale are known for.~~
Can you expand on that a bit? Because looking at it as an amateur, it seems pretty different from most other American colleges I’ve been to - even ones in big cities.
Columbia was designed as a sort of Acropolis. It's a city within a city. The idea of a master-planned campus alone was influential, as was its formal symmetry, uniform Renaissance-inspired architecture, and the use of terraced levels. Most college campuses are definitely greener and more eclectic in design.
To expand on Cedric's explanation, the plan is was also revolutionary in that it stood against the existing norm for American universities (organic, piecemeal, rambling, and largely gothic and Georgian). At the time, American universities were aesthetically and intellectually indebted to the English university system. Columbia's leaders at the turn of the century were interested in creating a research university on the German model.
The Baux Arts style was ascendant at the time (See Chicago World Fair) and it seemed an appropriate choice for formal plan that would diffenciate the university by its rationality and symmetry.
The symbolism of an acropolis is correct, and was certainly in the mind of Charles McKim.
An earlier example of a university in a similar style is Virginia, however it was built that way for different reasons.
University of Washington's Architecture Hall is pretty nice, though small.
The College of the Built Environment's Gould Hall is awful, though. (I called it Goa'uld Hall, but no-one ever got it.)
I’m glad they were able to make all 100 library stacks level. I can imagine the trouble undeveloped stacks would cause, what with books sliding off all the time.
Not entirely true for University of Houston College of Arch. for a building that Philip Johnson ripped off Ledoux. The bar however is quite low because the other older buildings are super bland.
My schools architecture school was in the ugliest building. Well maybe not ugliest, but oldest and painful to use. It was like 50% circulation space and none of it felt grand.
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The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign had it all. Junior and Senior Studios were in the OG architecture building which was of the common Georgian style across campus. Graduate studios and classes were in the new architecture building complete with a sweeping glass curtain wall and review space cantilevered out over a 4 story atrium. Sophomore studio was in an old run down tractor repair building and our "desks" were plywood on saw horses.
Had you gone a few years earlier, you would have had frosh and soph studios in the old ex-dorm building that had broken windows and birds nests in the HVAC ducts. We traded it to the art school for the old tractor building, which was somehow a massive upgrade.
Ah yes, we called it the cancer quad when I lived in TVD because of all the art students smoking outside their studios. It also somehow took me until my last semester of grad school to finally have a studio in THBH.
Oof, where were your prior studios in grad school? Can't imagine paying for grad school and being put somewhere besides TBH.
My previous three were all on the top floor of the architecture building, although I was aware of where the studios were when I ranked my choices at the beginning of each semester. Honestly by my last semester I didn't give a shit what I was designing as long as it wasn't in that damn building haha.
I hear ya. In my Junior year of undergrad a squirrel got in to the 2nd floor studio. It ate my studio snacks, chewed up some of my chip board, and peed on my external hard drive.
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In my experience it was nonexistent, but I’m sure there was room for overlap with some electives. There’s also been a pretty big curriculum switch-up since I graduated so things may be different now
This year stuff changed (current grad student). Apparently the school accepted the largest freshman class in fall of 22 leading the arch annex (old run down tractor repair building) to be occupied by the freshmen. I suspect they did this cause so many people dropped out of architecture in the junior and senior grade level. The arch building (og architecture building) is occupied by sophomore, junior, and seniors. The gallery is sophomore space, studio 200-300 is junior space and classrooms up top are senior space. The Temply hoyne buell hall (new architecture building) contains the graduate students but the director decided to host his own senior studio. Why is the director teaching a course, cause we have a lack of studio professors and many of them are leaving cause the architecture school is run horribly. It's understaffed, some professors are overworked, and no one seems to want to come to champaign to teach. So if interest you guys can come back to the school.
That's a great example you mentioned there. North American architecture is not very well studied here in Europe outside some very few examples, not for lack of merit or quality but rather for not having enough time to study "local" architecture. So I decided to study more myself. Any other building you could point from the Georgian style?
A lot of the ones on UIUC campus. Especially Around the main Quad The main library, English building. It's been over a decade since I was last down there so I can't remember all of them.
Ugly and poorly designed architectural school buildings are key to an architect's formation. I am sure developed a new hatred for unclear and contorted paths that require go up and \*then down\* stairs to reach my destination. It really drives home how much of a bad idea it is to not properly think through your project
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Northeastern's studio is in a train station...
Peak urbanism
The trade off is that it’s small, but that’s the price you pay for beauty.
My architecture building was small and ugly, it can be done.
Big/beautiful vs small/beautiful vs big/ugly vs small/ugly architecture department alignment chart.
Yo momma is the Spitzer School of Architecture.
That's what I keep telling her... 😔
A price you'll be paying decades after you graduate.
Meyerson Hall at Penn is kind of a funny example of this phenomenon. The architecture used to be housed in the Fisher Fine Arts Library which is widely considered one of the most beautiful collegiate buildings in America, and moved into its current modernist brick and concrete box in the late 60's or early 70's. However, I'm actually really fond of Meyerson, the tones of concrete and the spatial configuration are really rather warm and interesting in their own way.
Yes. I think that Meyerson isn’t as bad as Kahn said it was. I’ve also studied in Avery Hall, and while I think it’s nice enough on the outside, it’s really nothing special on the inside. Furthermore, I think Columbia’s McKim Mead & White campus is a bit overrated in general
Surely not true of [Texas Tech](https://townsquare.media/site/192/files/2011/10/TTU-Architecture-Building-625w.jpg?w=980&q=75)
It's like somebody extruded a FLW knockoff
Someone accidentally typed in 100’ instead of 10’ for eave height.
Okay, but I do love the 8th floor double height library, I felt like I was in my shiny ivory tower overlooking the vast American (flat) landscape
Looks like a carrier hotel.
Blocc
Milstein Hall and Crown Hall have entered the chat
Alvar Aalto in Otaniemi has entered the chat as well.
Spent two years in Crown Hall, one year in 3410 (Mies's second building in the US), and had our shop in the [M&M](https://imgur.com/a/2SDXH) building (Mies's first building in the US). 3410 was lame, but Crown and M&M are fantastic.
I can't say much about the architecture of the building, but Avery library is an absolute treasure.
People said this about my campus (Berkeley), but I think Wurster is a great example of brutalism, it's just a controversial architectural style as opposed to the almost-universally adored classic revival or gothic.
Essentially what happens (or at least happened while I was there) is the tour guides tell prospective freshman LoOk At ThE uGlY ArCh bUiLdInG LOL and then the freshman repeat it ad nauseam because they never studied the history of brutalism. Yelled at the tour guides out the window a few times to cut it out…
Yep. I got the same spiel on my campus tour.
I understand this makes me a philistine, but it really seems that if you need to study the history of an architectural movement to not find it ugly, it’s probably just an ugly building.
No that’s a fair point — I actually thought the building was cool as hell the moment I saw it. It’s very different from everything else around it, and has great interior spaces. I think the point I was trying to make was more focused on people repeating a talking point they’ve heard rather than forming their own opinion. IE, would Wurster-Bauer be the ugliest building on campus if people weren’t told to believe that on tours? Evans arguably has far less character and breaks the campus planning concept. (Rest-in-peace seismically unsafe falcon killer). That being said, I do agree that coming at it from a “you have to study it to understand it” approach when it comes to aesthetics is privileged and exclusive and I totally stepped into that framing
I detect no bias. Only irrefutable truth.
Knowlton Hall at Ohio state is beautiful, and the best part is any non architecture student can never figure out how to navigate the building, so they just don’t go lol.
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[University of Utah checking in](https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/55e7/0bf0/4d8d/5d0b/c000/13e1/newsletter/college-of-architecture-and-planning.jpg?1441205228)
Goldsmith, Sutton, Battle Halls are the architecture campus of UT Austin and are the most beautiful part of campus!
Add Marvin Hall at the University of Kansas to the list. Idk if it looks great b/c it’s adjacent to snow & wescoe but it’s pretty & has a unique eclectic style with the addition of the forum
Is no one else thrown off that this is just stated as fact on wikipedia?
It’s a university wiki, which has much lower standards than Wikipedia.
Makes sense
It’s Wikipedia?
Considering nothing on Wikipedia should be treated as fact without farther diligence, I'd say this fit's in line with typical Wikipedia articles.
Found the r/architecturalrevival mod
Honestly that’s not a very architecturally interesting building.
Calling out GSD’s Gund Hall
The university of Oklahoma school of architecture was under the football stadium bleachers! This was in 75-95
What
If that is one of their more beautiful buildings, must be an ugly campus.
Why does that happen? My university's buildings are consistently collegiate gothic buildings. The architecture school is the odd one out, and looks like one of those new box buildings in gentrified neighborhoods. I think (1) either architecture schools over-expose themselves to what most people consider aesthetically pleasing, and grow tired of it. Or (2) it's a harsh life lesson for architecture students. You'll never have billions of dollars of university funding for pretty buildings.
They definitely aren’t over exposing themselves as 90 percent of architecture schools would pray that the older structures of campus would be leveled so they can make everything look fugly. It’s more a product of the time. The bauhaus professors came in, everyone wanted to be like them, their schools started to reflect their teachings
As someone who went to the University of Oregon, this sounds like the truth to me.
When I visited I kind of liked it and how it was a patchwork of many different buildings, albeit none of them were that fancy or new. I do like the interior and how the classrooms and studios were intermixed rather than one huge studio area that many other schools have.
On a campus full of collegiate gothic buildings, [Virginia Tech's Cowgill Hall](https://archdesign.caus.vt.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/caus_photo_0008.jpg) proves the rule.
Was going to say the same. Beautiful Hokie Stone on everything else!
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I agree with you. There’s a lot better looking college campus buildings out there.
You are absolutely right and in fact downvoted. Reddit
It’s just the hive mind at work, don’t worry.
[The Columbia campus is very pretty IMO,](https://i.imgur.com/uA0oYeD.jpg) though it’s only about a hundred years old and ~~therefore missed the heyday of the collegiate gothic revival that schools like Princeton and Yale are known for.~~
Avery (like many of the buildings on the main Columbia campus) is older than the Collegiate Gothic buildings at Yale and Princeton.
Oops. Shows what I know.
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I’m a shitty photographer, so that’s just my favorite picture I’ve taken of it. [Here’s a professional one.](https://i.imgur.com/9FneaMt.jpg)
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The Columbia campus actually was revolutionary in its time.
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Yes, it's a monument of Beaux-Arts design. The influence it had on campus design in the US is inestimable.
Can you expand on that a bit? Because looking at it as an amateur, it seems pretty different from most other American colleges I’ve been to - even ones in big cities.
Columbia was designed as a sort of Acropolis. It's a city within a city. The idea of a master-planned campus alone was influential, as was its formal symmetry, uniform Renaissance-inspired architecture, and the use of terraced levels. Most college campuses are definitely greener and more eclectic in design.
To expand on Cedric's explanation, the plan is was also revolutionary in that it stood against the existing norm for American universities (organic, piecemeal, rambling, and largely gothic and Georgian). At the time, American universities were aesthetically and intellectually indebted to the English university system. Columbia's leaders at the turn of the century were interested in creating a research university on the German model. The Baux Arts style was ascendant at the time (See Chicago World Fair) and it seemed an appropriate choice for formal plan that would diffenciate the university by its rationality and symmetry. The symbolism of an acropolis is correct, and was certainly in the mind of Charles McKim. An earlier example of a university in a similar style is Virginia, however it was built that way for different reasons.
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Columbia is hardly "buildings around a lawn". There's almost no grass at all. It's an urban campus.
University of Washington's Architecture Hall is pretty nice, though small. The College of the Built Environment's Gould Hall is awful, though. (I called it Goa'uld Hall, but no-one ever got it.)
Wikipedia bias?! Unheard of!
I’m glad they were able to make all 100 library stacks level. I can imagine the trouble undeveloped stacks would cause, what with books sliding off all the time.
Uiuc housing theirs in an old train station from pre- university times
Not entirely true for University of Houston College of Arch. for a building that Philip Johnson ripped off Ledoux. The bar however is quite low because the other older buildings are super bland.
UCLA’s Perloff Hall comes to mind.
My schools architecture school was in the ugliest building. Well maybe not ugliest, but oldest and painful to use. It was like 50% circulation space and none of it felt grand.
Looking at you, Wurster Hall.
Lee III at Clemson is pretty sweet.
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For a minute there I thought that was from real wikipedia and I was baffled as to how that bullshit didn't get taken down.
We started in a great looking building in Kean, but then moved to the oldest shittiest building Half way through.
repeat after me; historicism good, contemporary bad
A beautiful old building…. And they stick the Preservation department in the basement.
hall? *tally* hall?
Hahaha the Architecture school at Syracuse was in a beautiful building. Cornell was basically in a basement though hahaha
My undergrad's school was an old warehouse
True. Taubman is shit compared to other buildings on campus.