a stroll through baylor architecture - and what it tells us

Today I took a stroll through Baylor. I come up here twice a year, but it's been a while since I've stayed at a place that allows me to walk to campus.

What interested me was that, as I've noticed before, a west-to-east trip through the campus can give the careful observer a history of Baylor, a history of academia, and a history of attitudes toward education, without a word being spoken. It's all written in the very architecture.

Start along the western edge, where some old dorms are: Memorial and Alexander. Across the mall, you can see Burleson Hall. To your right, Waco Hall and Tidwell, to your left, the commanding Pat Neff hall. All these buildings were built during an era, the late nineteenth century through, say, the nineteen-forties, in which education was viewed as a lofty thing, a drink from the fount of knowledge. The buildings have spires and columns, and references to classical times. Pat Neff bears the inscription along its entablature, "Wisdom is better than rubies." And you get the idea that the wisdom gained from higher education was worth any ruby anyone from that era could scrounge up. The towers soar, and bring the eye with them, to the heavens. Universities at the time were considered secular temples, and looked like them.

Crossing through Burleson and Old Main, you're standing in the oldest spot, architecturally, in Baylor. Old Main was built in 1887, and its ivied windows and gorgeous gold domes made it one of the finest buildings, bar none, west of the Mississippi. Burleson Hall was once a dormitory. Its cornerstone, uncovered during a 1973 restoration — right during the flowering of third-wave feminism — says that the building is "dedicated to feminine piety." Yep, it was one of the first female dorms in academia.

Emerging into the Quadrangle, you see Carroll Science and Carroll Library to your left and right. For some reason, Carroll Science is where the English department lives, and Carroll Library is where, for years, you took math. They're twin buildings, done in typical turn-of-the-century style: blond rough-hewn stone, with magnificent stairways. They spiffed up Carroll Science in the nineties, replacing the antique windows with larger, black-tinted ones. This creates the vibe of an old geezer in slick shades, slightly disturbing in precisely the same way Jack Nicholson is.

Far to your right, beyond Carroll Science, is Tidwell Bible Building, which looks like it was designed by someone trying to replicate an Old Testament ziggurat. Its entire crown, circling the third-floor home of the Philosophy Department, is a frieze in white stone — an ivory tower indeed.


To your left, beyond Carroll Library, is the SUB, the Student Union Building. The official name was changed in the eighties to the Bill Daniel Student Center, but no one ever called it that. Students have their own names for things. The SUB has seven drawing rooms of various sizes, all done in hardwood, gilded plaster, old paintings of donors, Persian rugs, and mahogany furniture with damask upholstery. I always took that building as a compliment. It's so much better than the hard architecture you find at other colleges' student centers: the bolt-everything-down-so-it-doesn't-get-stolen aesthetic that's so depressing. There are bookshelves full of old books, big stuffy chairs to sit in, and, every Tuesday to this day, a social hour with free milkshakes so that the young men and women of the university may fraternize. This was the vision of academe that our great-grandparents had: a place that ennobles the spirit, that encourages the exchange of ideas as well as the exchange of the social pleasantries that are so necessary for an enlightened society to function, led by people who had acquainted themselves with the best that has been thought and said.

With that Baylor behind you, you see across the street its last vestige: Rena Marrs McLean Gymnasium. It's not a gym; it's not an athletic center; it's a gymnasium, with pillars and columns, and, inaccurately, robed classical statues in niches along the pediment. When that's your gymnasium, you might come to see physical fitness and athletic contest as being part of a larger picture, as part of a balanced life of mind and body.

Pass that, and you enter a new era. Ahead of you is the middle twentieth century, with its retooling of the university as a place where young citizens can become equipped as Cold Warriors of the highest degree. You walk along the strip of grass called Fountain Mall (named for a fountain built by people who confused modern innovation with refusal to acknowledge that a fountain should involve water at some point; Baylor recently improved the campus by tearing it down and replacing it with a shady walkway). Ahead is the semi-Miesian Moody Library, pleasantly proportioned and windowed but unremarkable compared to what you've seen. To your left you see a monstrous red block, and to your right you see a monstrous red block. These are Sid Rich and Marrs McLean science buildings, both huge, ugly, and devoid of any architectural effort beyond their capacity for tons and tons of new students.

The fifties and sixties and seventies, of course, saw this phenomenon replicated all over the country. Universities expanded to fit a swell of students who came to college mainly to improve their financial lot. The buildings that sprang up during this expansion gave modernism a bad name: cheap, huge, industrial. But they perfectly expressed the new attitude toward education. College was now a stepping-stone toward middle-class life. People began speaking of college strictly in terms of the kind of job you could get with a degree. The G.I. Bill, passed in 1944, was all about the American Dream of prosperity. In all the discussions about it, you'll rarely find any high-flown talk about drinking from the fount of knowledge. All those G.I.s were guaranteed a college education, and they needed a place to go. Sid Rich and Marrs McLean gave them one, and gave them nothing else.

Further to the right you see Constitution Hall and Hankamer, the old law school and business school buildings. Again, they're square, big, and prosaic. Prosaic! That's the word: these five buildings, and the several smaller ones that surround them, contain, in fact, not one ounce of architectural poetry. Where is a single form of beauty to be gazed on, to reward the sustained attention? Where is the sense of event, of aspiration, of nobility? It's behind you, that's where it is.

A long hike, and that dismal era, too, is behind you. For the most part, what's ahead is far more beautiful, if in a less beautiful way. It's a grasping at the former mellow grandeur of academe — and a grasping only. The Music School, built in the early nineties, was the first of this new era. It has a late-eighties look to it, a bit fussy and square-shouldered, but certainly a relief from the prison-yard it faces. Higher education once again has taken on a bit of dash, but this time there's a different feel to it. What is it? A look at the "Slick" might be instructive. That's the SLC, the Student Life Center. But the students call it the Slick, and slick it is. It's a luxury athletic club with a two-story climbing rock, state-of-the-art racquetball courts, workout rooms, and, of course, computers (every public place at Baylor has dozens of computers). When this building went up, students joked that in a few years Baylor Athletics would surge to the top of the Big Twelve in the areas of Twisty Slide and Lazy River.

Behind that joke is the truth. The children of those mid-century upward strivers are now potential customers. And tough customers they are. Universities know that they need to woo students with attractive new buildings, attractive new amenities, attractive new attractiveness. What matter if it all bears an oddly familiar scent of inauthenticity? Those customers are used to it. The university has journeyed from secular temple to middle-class stepping-stone to, finally, shopping mall. Think I'm overstating it? We can discuss it at the food court. There's a Taco Bell on campus, and a "Chili's Too," one of the first of its kind. Even the cafeterias have come to resemble mall food courts, complete with fake village-square nomenclature.

Of course, there is much beauty in the midst of all this. The new law school and the new sciences building are both stunning examples of modern university architecture. They pay homage to Baylor's architectural past while speaking flawlessly to the moment. The law school is stolid, massive, inspiring. It brilliantly co-opts and updates the traditional forms — the dome, the columns, the inscripted entablature, the classical proportions. The sciences building should be on magazine covers, with its snazzy classical facade folded into a generous feminine swoop of glass and steel, presiding over an intimate plaza, a fountain that's all about water, a harmonious meandering stone-bedded stream. It's operatically dramatic and energizing and inviting. It lightning-bolts you with its glamorizing of the power of ideas. If I were Robert Sloan (the recently deposed President), I'd defend my entire presidency by simply saying, "Science Building, Science Building, Science Building, Science Building, Science Building, ...."

But these triumphs aren't the only symbols of the recent past. It's true that the east end of campus now has spires for the first time. That does make Baylor's skyline lovely. But it's important to note that the spires most visible as one approaches the university belong to... but is it really true? Yes. The parking garage. There's a new parking garage on Baylor's easternmost edge — the students, wise and witty as ever, call it the "Garage Mahal" — and it is crowned by several spires that imitate the ones on Old Main. Except, as everyone must notice, these spires aren't attached to temples of higher learning. Spires, whether on churches or castles or mosques or schools, point not only to the heavens but also to the noble or important activity going on below. These spires, though, adorn a parking garage. They perform the same duty as the spires on a shopping mall or theme park. One half-expects to see colorful, rigid flags, frozen in permanent unfurling, sitting on top.

Crass commercialism, shopping-mall pandering, plastered with the facades and spires of academe — isn't this exactly what Robert Sloan's critics accused him of? Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks, and the hand builds. A school can't help but express the views of the society that builds it.

What will Baylor look like next? Though you may never attend class there, send a child there, or even set foot there, the answer is nonetheless up to you.

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