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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.