that ionic column makes me grumpy…

To make you all grumpy with me this week, I shall again visit The Architecture of Happiness, which I started going over last week.  Written by Alain de Botton, this was the first book I read in my recent spree of architecture, urban design, and urban studies readings, all hopefully tying in with the greater picture of the urban union experience.

wait for it… wait for it… the bigger picture is coming…

One of the concepts that stood out to me later in de Botton’s book was the concept of home, which he gets into on page 107.  There, he states:

In turn, those places whose outlook matches and legitimates our own, we tend to honour with the term ‘home.’  Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name… We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.  We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances.

Folks in ACUI I think will get why this page stood out to me, and how the talk of home and what it represents jumped off the page.  In the student union business, we often say our buildings and all that they do and stand for represent the ‘living room’ of campus, a place away from the res halls, the labs, the classroom, for students to relax, learn, work, eat, learn, congregate, nap, meet, plan, learn, and learn.

… not the home I was going for… I guesssss.

While we do hope to challenge views and encourage exploration of ideals in our student organizations (especially being founded on the debate society ideals), we do so in ways that develop and create new opportunities for growth, and in a comfortable environment where hopefully mistakes can happen and be learned from.

What especially sticks out though, is why it is so key that multicultural and GLBTQ centers be a cornerstone and essential piece of the student union experience.  For many GLBTQ students, including myself and many others at Texas A&M, the GLBTQ Resource Center on campus (which was not in the union) was that ‘home’ in the ‘psychological sense,’ because our other homes on campus, our rooms or our classrooms, were perhaps places of danger and discomfort.  To have a ‘refuge’ like a GLBTQ Resource Center housed in a building that is created for that greater purpose says a lot, and is something I think ACUI needs to ensure its members remember and strive for in our work with campus partners and in our renovations.

I’m currently reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, another Adam Welker suggestion, and I found a parallel with something de Botton discussed in Happiness, relating to balance.  Jacob’s discusses at length the concept of ‘urban diversity,’ which gets to an idea of balance that de Botton alludes to on page 195:

Beauty [of balance] is a likely outcome whenever architects skilfully mediate between any number of oppositions, including the old and the new, the natural and the man-made, the luxurious and the modest, and the masculine and the feminine.

The new Emerson College building in LA. Gif via Archinect (link if you click on the gif) h/t Matthew Marano

Meshing Jacob’s ‘urban diversity’ with de Botton’s discussion of beauty through the balance of old and new comes something that urban unions and campuses must actively deal with in how they inform, alter, and add to (or detract from) their immediate urban community.  If our campus border lies on a street with overwhelming amounts of older and classic architecture, does value lie in creating a new, more modernly designed union than staying with the homogeneous design of the area, offering some visual engagement and breaks in the look of the street?  Granted, I do realize that this is only one aspect of what creates vibrant urban communities, but as we assess our facilities and our design, we should be striving for something that moves us forward rather than perhaps keeps up the usual.

Beyond the urban campus though, I think this concept of balance translates well into many union or campus center designs that attempt to balance the old and the new in their buildings.  Coming to mind are UConn’s Student Union and the Mass College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences Griffin Center, both of which add new, glass-heavy structures to older, brick-heavy buildings, to mesh and celebrate the old and new, the tradition and the future of what these buildings stand for on campus.  Even simple nods to old structures, such as the Ohio Union using reclaimed wood and stone from the old union to build and furnish aspects and rooms of the new union, evokes balance.  This balancing of the old and new adds a vitality to our environments that engages the user, and opens a book to tell us a story, which is what de Botton wants architecture to do.

I don’t know Davos, just keep reading me the story.

So, let’s go to the next step, and one that seems counter to the points I made above about buildings being a refuge.  Near the end of the book, de Botton introduces the Japanese concept of wabi, which identifies beauty with unpretentious, simple, unfinished, transient things.  He illustrates wabi with stories of Japanese appreciation for the look of unfinished pottery or the look of a moss-covered walkway when Westerners only see a walkway that needs to be cleaned immediately.

where could wabi exist for you? for our students? for our faculty?

Beyond this concept of wabi, which I experienced firsthand over in Japan, de Botton develops around this idea of embracing the peculiar, the out of the ordinary, which, if I’m reading it right, may inspire someone else, or may inform future communities much more potently than our current ones.  “It is books, poems and paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge,” which leads me to ask: why can’t our unions do this?

add some peculiar to the regular. how would it influence the student experience?

How can unions, through architecture, art galleries, involvement experiences, offer up to students “the confidence to take seriously feelings” that they would “never have thought to acknowledge?”  I said above that unions could and should be a refuge, but at the same time, they can and should be a point of challenging and developing students and communities.

Our mission is to help students delve deeper into their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and experiences, and unions can offer up that opportunity with both an environment that supports development but also has elements that challenge them into growth (yes, I’m pulling in challenge and support).  I think even if our unions trend more towards the classical or the traditional, they must have peculiar elements: a room that is exclusively saved for art exhibits, a computer lab that is tucked into a uniquely built space that gives off a different feel than a standard lab with rows of computers, an amphitheater that can serve multiple purposes and as a background in many different ways.  This is the power of architecture and design to give us the confidence to tell our own stories.

What’s the peculiar in your space?

 

the architecture of grumpiness…

Please find below a post about architecture, something I have learned through osmosis by dating an architect, drinking lots of wine with architecture students, and spending late nights keeping Eugene company while he works on architecture projects.  Architecture.

Step 1: lolchitecture. Step 2: Click the image.

So, when I got on my recent, and still going strong, kick about urban design and particularly how it applied to the urban college union, I reached out to said architecture students and friends for some suggestions.  Both Eugene and Adam Welker (who’s Memory Card podcast you must check out) suggested as my first book on architecture The Architecture of Happiness, by Alain de Botton, a disturbingly heavy book for how small it is.

That physical observation would carry through into its contents though, as well, as Happiness proved to be a short but very heavy, dense, and fulfilling read.  Lots of thoughts about it initially, that have been reformed and reflected upon as I’ve delved into the subject a bit deeper, talking over it with colleagues, reading articles and other books.  So, if you will allow me, I would love to explore some of the concepts in Happiness and how we might be able to connect them with the current state of the urban college union.

One of the first topics that stood out to me in the book was a discussion about what buildings can do to us, how they can influence us, and how it is “architecture’s task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be.”  If that does sound goo-goo-ga-ga student development theory, I don’t know what does.

But sensitivity to architecture also has its more problematic aspects… if our happiness can hang on the colour of the walls or the shape of a door, what will happen to us in most of the places we are forced to look at and inhabit? (p 13)

I think this concept of how the design and feel of a building can affect our happiness or ability to get things done resonates at a time when lots of unions are being renovated or reconstructed, but also budgets are tight, and many campuses are focusing those funds elsewhere on campus, allowing a student center to take on deferred maintenance.  We tell ourselves and we tell our students and our colleagues and the public that our unions are the heartbeat of campus, the student living room.  That’s a tall order for buildings that don’t look it, are not designed to fit the bill for a modern student living room, and what does that mean to our campus’s messaging and support for it’s students?

I currently work in a campus center that is designed in the brutalist style, which let’s just stop and look at that word for a couple of minutes.  Nothing says community like brutalist architecture.  It’s a Boston thing, as our City Hall is also the same style of architecture.

By the standards of a lot of union construction going on right now, the lack of windows and the lack of what I can only call “internal seeing” (I’m sure there is some actual term for it) makes an older style union, especially in the light of newly constructed unions, a less inviting place.  Internal seeing is the ability inside the building for users to see each other across multiple spaces and up and down multiple floors, either via open space or glass.  I got to visit my old stomping grounds, The Memorial Student Center, at Texas A&M this past fall for the first time since graduating in 2009.  The main lobby used to be a confined, tan, 1 floor rectangular hallway space.  No openness, no internal seeing.

This is looking up from the lower floor into the open lobby area of the new MSC.

This amount of light, internal seeing, and space was something I never thought possible after living in the old MSC for years.

The other concept I wanted to touch on that is big in modern union construction is flexibility of spaces, which is also exposed in de Botton’s quote above.  Happiness means very different things to each person, and so essentially, for a union to bring happiness to our students, our spaces must reflect this diversity, these options, these multi-faceted pieces of how people find happiness and how they use spaces personally.  Up until this book, my thinking on space flexibility was all about programming and ensuring union spaces could be maximized for programming via structural flexibility.  Now, de Botton has me thinking about how our spaces actually communicate to our students individually, and whether they say “Welcome!” or “GTFO bro.”

This scene keeps popping into my head thinking about this.

The other piece I’ll get into in this post is the concept of going beyond just a basic functionality in our buildings, as de Botton puts it “we are in the end unlikely to respect a structure which does no more than keep us dry and warm.”  We get even deeper into this with a quote from John Ruskin about how we seek two things from buildings we encounter:

We want them to shelter us.  And we want them to speak to us – to speak to us of whatever we find important and need to be reminded of.

I think this is also one of those themes that is constant in modern unions, the desire to ensure the story of the institution and the students is being told.  Whether its the history or the current events that we hold dear, storytelling through design is a must it seems in current union design and redesign.  Whether it is walls of history, alumni stories, or celebration of campus resources like at the Ohio Union, or it is the recent renovation of the UW-Stout Memorail Student Center which offered a chance to bring more light into a space and to tell the entire timeline of history of the campus through images.  We want our buildings to tell our stories, but also to tell our students they are welcome.

If you need advice on how to tell a story, check in with Ms. Lippy.

de Botton invokes Ruskin again later, saying that

Buildings speak – and on topics which can readily be discerned.  They speak of democracy or aristocracy, openness or arrogance, welcome or threat, a sympathy for the future or a hankering for the past.

How should our buildings speak?  Should they speak in one way only, or must the building balance what it says to honor both the tradition of what it stands for but also the future of what our institutions are shooting for?  I think we can easily agree that they should say “Welcome” but do we know what that truly looks like, and what other values do we want to ensure they are saying to our community?  Openness, transparency, the quest for knowledge, San Dimas High School Football rules?

What?