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Not exactly built to lift the soul Here is a list of the 20 most ugly university campuses in the USA. I do not disagree with the choices. I have to say that back home, one of the worst was the University of Brighton, where I studied; the only mitigating factor was the lovely Sussex countryside. Other graduates of Brit universities may disagree. Go on, put up your votes for the worst, or for that matter, the nicest (it has to be pretty much any of the old Cambridge colleges).
(Hat tip: Stephen Hicks).
Random question: is there a correlation, or even a cause-effect relationship, between the aesthetic crapness of a place of learning and the amount of learning that actually goes on?
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No idea, but having been to Exeter University the ugliness of the campus was not a concern!
I’m biased but the University of Glasgow has to be the most impressive University building in the UK
I studied abroad at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. Pretty lakes – HORRENDOUS buildings. Stalinist-looking Lego nightmares.
Worst: Université Lyon 2
Best: Queen’s College Oxford.
Don’t think there’s a correlation; Lyon 2 would be a nasty leftie snake pit even if it looked like Cambridge, while Queen’s was filled with oddly dull people.
I agree with you about a lot of Brighton University buildings, but its main problem surely has to be that it doesn’t really have a campus at all.
Sussex University has a fine campus, but the fact that some of the buildings are listed is a problem – Sir Basil Spence imagined that his iconic Falmer House would adapt to growing needs, with its gaps filled in over the years. Unfortunately with Grade 1 listed status (scroll down), no-one is filling any gaps, not now, not ever.
University Park Nottingham for best.
UEA for worst. I agree with Chris. The nice surroundings just make that hideousness even more nasty. Lancaster is almost worse on that score.
And no, it don’t work like that. I got a lot done on the lake in a boat. Or on the downs. Where better to study physics than surrounded by nature? Somewhere you can see the stars?
Disclosure: I am a Nottingham graduate.
I reckon it’s horses for courses. While Oxford and Cambridge are quite pretty in their respective surroundings and the dreaming spires and isolated fens suit the philosophers and academics who attend those august universties, Brunel fits it’s London high rise Council estate location perfectly and the stained concrete walls and cracked walkways fit the scholastic purposes of the institution to a tee.
Scurry from lab to lab and once there, get your head down and pound that keyboard.
For beautiful, I’d put the quad in springtime at the University of Washington. The first time you see it you’re left mouth-gaping.
The Quad at the U-Dub.
I used to be in Pittsburgh once a week. Carnegie Mellon is the best looking university I have seen in the US. It reminds me of a cream frosted wedding cake. And it is much better looking than Harvard or my alma mater, U of Michiganny.
And Pittsburgh is chaming and vibrant. Even people’s accents are endearing: “I need some towner for the cowpier.”
But being utterly off-base is a pitfall of reviewing something’s looks and never having seen it, as our blogger did.
I would put forward Oxford University as one possessing some of the most beautiful buildings in Britain (see, for example, The Museum of Natural History), but the problem is that it also has some of the ugliest buildings ever built for academia, like the Department of Experimental Psycology. I do not know what they were dreaming in the 1960’s and 1970’s, but they made a few of those nightmares into buildings.
#9-IIT was done by Mies van der Rohe.Don’t they know he was one of the “Great” architects of the last century? This puts the International Style in its place,eh?
Robert:
True, but it’s surrounded by junk.
Mind you, it’s nothing compared to what was planned in the ’60s. The whole area surrounded by Byres Road, Great George Street, Bank Street and University Avenue was to be flattened. At least some of it was saved. The University Avenue end of University Gardens gives some idea of what the area used to be like before the library and the Boyd Orr Citadel. They seem determined to wreck the other end, though. Does the new Computer Science building have to look like a server rack?
If we include Canada in the competition, then I’d say that the Université Laval campus in Quebec City would make it close to the top of this list. Such a collection of disgusting concrete boxes in one place would be hard to find even in the former Soviet Bloc. And I visited in it on a pleasant sunny day in August with everything in bloom — I can only imagine what it must look like on a gloomy autumn or winter day (nice broad green surfaces are its only saving grace).
Generally, I’d say that the ugliness of campuses is roughly proportional to the number of their buildings that were built from the sixties to the eighties. The more recent ones tend to be plain, uninteresting, and soulless, but at least not outright vomit-inducing, except when “artistically”-minded management decides to spend some money on a pile of kitsch of the sort that passes for “creative” architecture nowadays.
On a more general note, I never really understood why modern civilization, which certainly has the wealth and technology to build marvels that could easily overshadow anything built in the past, is producing buildings that are plain and uninteresting at best, and disgusting piles of kitsch at worst. With a very few exceptions, in any modern city, one has to look for pre-WW2 buildings to find anything reasonably attractive.
As campus unis, University Park, Nottingham and St. Lucia, University of Queensland, Brisbane equal first.
Sorry, I should have said, equal first for nicest.
I have posted a selection of photos of CMU which I took the last time I visited home. Meaning the campus: I was an undergrad and grad there; my first company spun off from the place; then I spent much of the 80’s there as a research scientist…
Middlesex University has a number of ugly buildings but it’s soon to be defunct Ponder’s End campus has to be one of the ugliest.
By contrast the Founder’s Building of Royal Holloway is stunning.
I went to Oxford, generally reckoned one of the most beautiful universities and one of the best for learning. Does this prove your theory? You need to look more than skin deep.
Although Oxford undoubtedly attracts more than its share of the greatest minds, if you think going there you’ll be surrounded by original and stimulating thought then you’ll be as disappointed as I was. Like most universities, most people are there simply to get credentialed, and the fact that a BA – with an MA thrown in for free – from Oxford ranks amongst the most saleable credentials in the world only exacerbates this.
Do not be fooled by the fact that – along with Cambridge, LSE and a few European universities – Oxford has a significant population of students intending on a career in academia. This is, by itself, no guarantee of original and stimulating thought; not even an evening’s interesting conversation. Academia is one of the worst careers for mere credentialism outranking the useful or thoughtful, at least based on my own experience.
I met a greater number of interesting people – scratch that, I met a greater number of people with interestingly diverse views in an average last-Friday in Brian’s flat than I ever did in an evening in my Junior Common Room. Oh Brian, what a loss your “retirement” is.
I second that.
The same goes for painting and sculpture.
The 20 th century was very ugly in many respects, not least of them – aesthetically ugly.
Univiesity of York – dull concrete dull people outside of the town on a flat plain – yeuurghk It has the design of a council estate but without the edginess of urban decay .. a vile place
..and I’m not bright enough to use spell check it would seem wither …
It’s true that the Oxbridge colleges have a certain romantic grandeur to them that is hard to resist. But for my money you’d have to go a long way to beat Saarinen’s through-designed campus for Concordia College in Ft. Wayne, IN. It is stunning.
Sam Duncan wrote:
You should see the old Kiewit Computation Center at Dartmouth College. Lovely 1960s construction, although it wad demolished in 2000. Ironically, when I visited my aunt down in Cary, NC back in 1994, the public library there looked just like Kiewit.
Dartmouth also had the lovely “Shower Towers”. They too, like Kiewit, have been demolished.
Not sure that photo shows the towers at their best, Ted, but I can see what you’re getting at. What a shame.
Glasgow didn’t demolish anything of particular architectural beauty, it has to be said, but the area was a fairly attractive, leafy, 19th century residential district of yellow sandstone terraces. And what replaced it is definitely worse.
I shouldn’t really deep-link to someone else’s site, but this is the best photo I could find of the library: (Link)
This shows the Boyd Orr Building when it was new, with some of the demolition still taking place on the right (the library is in the background). Must be about 30 years ago.
IIT in Chicago is often swooned over by fans of the International Style, who often crawl around it with T-squares to admire the right angles. Some of the buildings were recently restored—they washed the windows.
There should be some words about buildings that are stupid on the inside. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago was designed by a famous architect who forgot to put windows in the painting rooms, so there was no natural light. He also designed a staircase that was 20 feet wide at the bottom and at the top, but narrowed to only 10 feet at the mid-landiong. In other words, he built a bottleneck into a fire exit. i don’t know how the fire marshall let him get away with it, but after two years of traffic jams they ripped it out and did a nice boring even one.
Last item: at my Alma mater, Northwestern U., the old Deering library was seriously overstuffed, and although it had a charming lobby, working in the stacks was like being in a U-boat. The replacement was bright and clean, with plenty of elbow room. However, in the rooms with the stacks the bookshelves radiated out from the center instead of being in straight rows. The upshot was that it was very difficult to find anything, a bad idea in a library.
I should also mention that my law school alma mater (Harvard) is a mix of delightful old buildings and hideous newer ones. The Law Library (Link)in particular is probably the platonic ideal for such things. Even the recent interior renovation was masterfully done. Although, as was inevitable, the “stacks” lost some of their character, the reading room itself is stunning.
Harvard Yard itself is, of course, the ne plus ultra of campus gothic in America (as it should be).
Leeds Uni is fairly shocking. One nice building at the front to impress visiting dignitaries and all the Soviet-style brutalist architechture out the back where students have to actually learn. It’s practical, but it sure ain’t pretty.