This thread covered the nicest campus. It looks like the University of Chicago wins - nice because I just finished paying *!&%$@ dollars to keep the place up.
How about the least attractive campus. Probably lots of candidates. My choices are (not in order)
Humboldt State in northern California. We just drove through, but it seemed like a bunch of buildings plopped down in a not very nice field. Totally unappealing.
NYU. It’s not that I don’t like urban campuses, but there is no there there. Cooper Union, another, much smaller, campus, is nice. If Washington Square Park were part of it, it would be okay, but I don’t think there is one nice building in the whole place - not that I’ve seen.
Boston University. Slums and high rises scattered around Kenmore Square. When I lived in Boston, in 1969, rumor had it BU had one of the last buildings in the United States that ran on DC power. I love Boston, but BU’s first letter could stand for blight.
The part of UCLA I saw was pretty dreadful, but there might be a good building hidden somewhere, so I won’t nominate it.
Well, BU has cleaned up Kenmore Square a lot; I doubt you’d recognize it. But that still doesn’t make the campus in anyway aesthetically pleasing, so I would say it is still in the running.
I’ll nominate Illinois Institute of Technology on the near south side of Chicago. The campus is located in the middle of some of the worst housing project in the world.
The worst I’ve been to is McGill, in Montreal. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable than me can fill us in, but from what I recall, a large part of the architectural design philosophy was about quelling violent student protests. True or not, the one time I visited, the place was butt-ugly.
A quick look at their main Campus Scenes webpage shows a distinct attempt to avoid showing the campus.
Almost any urban campus is pretty disgusting, but as a loyal BU alum, I have to say it was a full step up from where I took my BA, what with the scenic view of the Charles and all. In fact, the program I got my MA from at BU specifically mentions the view of the Charles from the grad program’s main classroom on Bay Shore Drive in their advertising, and I have to agree that it was very pleasing in a purely aesthetic sense.
This one’s got be a hundred-and-sixty way tied for first, since every urban campus is pretty much the same. I should know. I teach on one, and our expanses of grass can all be transversed in two steps, three if you have short legs.
Another one for BU, my alma mater. It’s come along way from what it once was, and there are a few pretty areas (Bay State Road, mostly), but on the whole…ugh. It’s possible to do an urban campus nicely, but that ain’t the way.
Well, Florida Southern College was nominated in the OTHER thread, but I think it belongs here. I don’t really like Frank Lloyd Wright. Terrible of me, isn’t it.
I second IIT. I went there for school, and for having one of the world’s premiere architects design its campus, it frankly sucks. Its not the housing projects in the vicinity that makes it so bad (I hear they are all but gone these days and the entire area is being revitalized) but the campus buildings and grounds itself are cold, stark and industrial ultramodern. It’s just not a warm campus.
I’ll also give a vote for Cleveland State University’s campus. It’s an ode to Brutalist architecture. I’ll admit however that the Administration building is a fine, original Art Deco structure.
Valparaiso University in Indiana isn’t really ugly per se, but the campus plan is based on a suburban office park model rather than a traditional collegiate model, and it does look the part. No quads, no commons, no courtyards, no gathering areas, no clearly defined center - just red brick buildings of various sizes and forms scattered around a ring road.
Given the choice, I’ll take ugly 1960s institutional and early 1970s brutalist-style concrete buildings on a traditional quad-and-common campus than attractive buildings arranged with no regard to creating an actual place.
I vote for the north campus of the University of Buffalo. It was built by Rockefeller to be the flagship of the SUNY system, but it is awful. Every building is brown brick. The signs are brown so they just disappear into the buildings. Plus, most of the buildings are just a big cube with windows, nothing architecturally interesting about them. Except for the Ellicott complex, better known as lego-land. I don’t know what the board was thinking when they went for this monstrosity. The link only goes to a campus map of the complex, but picture that each of those little boxes sticks off the top of the building. It looks like a cross between a Lego building and an oversize habitrail.
The campus is depressing enough as it is, but add in 4-6 months of gray in the winter and it’s a wonder anyone makes it through without suffering serious depression.
University at Albany’s uptown campus is very unimpressive. The buildings are all exactly the same – big boxes of yellowish brick in a concrete squre. Anything green is prohibited by law, it seems. There are four dorm complexe surrounding it – concrete towers surrounded by four boxes.
I’ve only been there once, but I think Mississippi State University’s campus is hideous. Just plain buildings everywhere, dirt fields, lots of ugly construction. It doesn’t help that Starkville isn’t exactly the most attractive city, though.
My choice for least aesthetic is RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) outside Rochester, N.Y. (I think it’s actually in the town of Henrietta). The entire campus is a smushed together collection of buildings built of exactly the same kind of brick, and with no ornamentation at all. All right angles and straight walls. It looks as if they dropped several truckloads of bricks on the spot and started building at random, with the stipulation that the buildings all touch. There are places where you can play handball, hemmed in by a floor and three walls of monotonously identical brick.
My choice for least aesthetic is RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) outside Rochester, N.Y. (I think it’s actually in the town of Henrietta). The entire campus is a smushed together collection of buildings built of exactly the same kind of brick, and with no ornamentation at all. All right angles and straight walls. It looks as if they dropped several truckloads of bricks on the spot and started building at random, with the stipulation that the buildings all touch. There are places where you can play handball, hemmed in by a floor and three walls of monotonously identical brick.
On the assumption that the winning candidate does not have to be from North America, i humbly offer, from my home town, the University of Technology, Sydney.
Hmm. I went to a conference across the street at the Omni, and it didn’t seem that bad. Though my daughter was slightly interested in going there once, stayed in a McGill dorm, and decided it was a bad idea.
With the expansion of the Math and Sciences Building, R.I.T.'s campus contains more bricks than the Great Wall of China. The brick color used is actually patented by the institute. When R.I.T. was constructing its current campus in 1968 they found it was more cost effective to buy the company that made the bricks, rather than the bricks themselves. The number of bricks increased again because of several construction projects, including the 160,000 square foot (15,000 m²)two-story Gordon Field House & Activies Center. The nearly universal use of bricks to construct the campus prompted students to give it the pseudo-affectionate nickname “Brick City.”
More Bricks than the Great Wal of China.
I wonder if this is the Least Aesthetic Campus Vicible from the Moon?
