Art: Building for Learning

In ancient times, the place of learning was usually a temple, a garden or a cloister. Compared with all these, the conventional classroom can seem pretty cold, college dormitory little more than a nest of cells. But with the huge increases in college endowments and enrollments over the past decade, old grads have been trying earnestly to provide their sons with something better than they had themselves, in the process have launched the biggest building boom ever on U.S. campuses across the land.

Outstanding are recent constructions at Wayne, Smith and Yale (see color pages). As architects are the first to agree, school architecture consists mainly in improvisations designed to keep pace with constantly changing needs and tastes. But these three offer bright-to-brilliant solutions to problems that will never be entirely solved.

Concrete & Paper Fans. Minoru Yamasaki’s $1,172,000 conference building at Wayne University in Detroit is almost too pretty to be great. But it does promise well for the 60 acres of new campus construction that Wayne and Yamasaki hope to add. A Seattle-born Nisei, Yamasaki is in love both with Western technology and Oriental refinement. His crisp little temple of talk, set beside a reflecting pool, owes a lot to the Taj Mahal, something to Japanese paper fans, and most of all to modern engineering in glass and concrete. Yamasaki puts precision over ornamentation and lets nature collaborate to provide most of the beauty. The sunlight falling through pyramids of glass makes a constantly changing flow of light through the lobby of his architectural gem.

The new dormitory of Smith College, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, cost $1,600,000 and is less of a success. It is neat, severely cheerful architecture of the currently approved mode, but perhaps its negative aspects ought to be more noticed. In such buildings one lives in style, but it is an edgy and uncomfortable sort of style. The Japanese maple in the courtyard looks as forlorn as a stray kitten at a board meeting. The 160 girl inhabitants occupy facing wings across the courtyard, with picture windows looking on each other’s picture windows. Yellow curtains, which let in too much sun, are compulsory. The girls keep opening their windows, which throws the air conditioning out of whack, so that everybody is too hot or too cold. Walled and barred at street level, the Smith dormitory looks a good deal less hospitable from the outside. No student living there will ever have an experience like that of one Smith alumna who lived in an old-fashioned dorm. Clambering in through a ground-floor window one night after hours (10 p.m.), she felt a friendly shove from behind, looked around to see Smith President William Allan Neilson winking at her.

Inverted Ship. Eero Saarinen’s hockey stadium at Yale cost nearly twice the original budget of $750,000 and is worth every nickel. It stands like an inverted Viking ship with a concrete arch for its keel. The vast ceiling of weathered planks sags slightly, tent fashion, from the central spine. From outside, the stadium looks as strange as a beached sea tortoise. Inside, its wide-open spaciousness, wintry light, and effect of weightlessness are exhilarating. The nation’s foremost young architect, who has created such modern wonders as the General Motors Technical Center (TIME, July 2, 1956), Saarinen may well be right in calling this latest effort “perhaps the finest thing that we have done.”