Spring 2002
Tales of U Buildings
September, 1963: First day, Nicholson
Clutching my class schedule, I find my way to Nicholson Hall, where the bookstore is tucked into a cramped basement. On my way in, I check my image in the glass door: wheat jeans, maroon crewneck, artfully sculpted bubble hairdo, cat's-eye glasses. I guess I'll pass.
I buy a Prentice-Hall Handbook for Writers, War and Peace, Norton Anthology of Literature, an anthropology textbook (by the U of M's own E. Adamson Hoebel), and History of Art. And I buy my very first maroon University of Minnesota notebook, emblazoned with a gold regents' seal, and a U of M decal for my car, a 1957 Ford Fairlane.
Total tab: probably around $40. Tuition, which I will pay later that day at a bursar's window in the "Ad[ministration] Building" (Morrill Hall), is about $90. I'll go home flat broke, but happy.
September, 1966: Nicholson revisted
I clamber up the steps to my office in 240 Nicholson Hall. I'm a graduate TA, and I'm about to teach my first college composition class.
My second-floor office smells of varnish, stale cigarette smoke, and a spicy curl of men's cologne. I gulp some cold leftover coffee and sit down in front of the Smith-Corona portable. I have about two hours to type and mimeograph the syllabus and compose myself. A bearded senior colleague--the source of the cologne--smiles indulgently.
"You'll do just fine," he says. His reassurance doesn't help.
As I enter the classroom, I realize that my fingers are purple from ditto ink. So, probably, are my cheeks, which I have been rubbing furiously. Thirty pairs of eyes stare at me from impassive faces, sizing me up. "Good afternoon," I say, affecting an air of superiority. I scrawl my name on the board. A few students copy it into their notebooks. A young man slouched in the back row yawns loudly. His look says, I defy you to teach me anything. I think, What am I doing here?
I smile ruefully, hopefully. A front-row student smiles back, her pen poised over wide-ruled notebook paper. I realize that my words will be recorded and remembered. They will have power. For better or worse, I will leave my mark on these students. And so I begin.
It's fall semester, and backpack- laden students scurry by the hundreds in and out of campus buildings. These buildings are the U's educational hothouses, where faculty scholars shine intellectual grow lights on budding and branching young minds. They are built for learning and built to last.
On the historic East Bank, the campus's signature buildings cluster around malls and knolls--sturdy, ancient (for Minnesota) three-to-four-story structures built of bricks and mortar, marble and limestone, their facades and foyers sporting filigreed columns, gargoyles, bas reliefs, and Latin and Greek paeans to higher learning. Across the river, the West Bank's high-rise classroom buildings, flat-planed red brick monuments to sixties modernism, tower over their less conspicuous neighbors amid concrete walks and constructed green spaces.
Later generations of buildings have broken the mold with idiosyncratic shapes and reflective surfaces, some looking more like sculptures than buildings, adding touches of architectural derring-do to the campus landscape--notably, the white stucco Barbara Barker Center for Dance, its sloping walls meeting the roof at odd angles that sweep sharply skyward like a ship's prow; and the Weisman Art Museum, a wild but elegant melange of glass and bright metal-clad shapes.
Every campus building tells stories of its time--the expansionist 1960s, for example, when the campus crossed the Mississippi to the West Bank to accommodate the invasion of the Baby Boomers; or the conservation-minded 1970s, when earth-sheltered, solar-paneled buildings like Williamson Hall sprouted from campus soil; or the iconoclastic and technology-driven 1990s, when new campus buildings, like the Gen-X students and postmodern scholars who inhabited them, were raising eyebrows and razing paradigms to build new ones.
Ask anyone who's been in any of these buildings, and you'll also get a more personal story about that building's history--about a favorite professor or class, a first meeting with a future mate or lifelong friend. In every building are enshrined the stories of thousands of students and professors, whose voices still echo from the rafters and whose names and initials are carved on the desks, proclaiming, I was here. I matter.
The case for renovation: honoring the University's heritage
Of course as campuses age and times change, form follows function and fashion, and older buildings come to be viewed as outdated and expendable. One solution is to demolish tired old buildings and start fresh--to erase their history, expel their ghosts and silence their stories. Another is to view these structures not as doddering eyesores but as venerable, albeit shopworn, historic treasures.
This issue of CLA Today has looked at some of the programs that will inhabit such a building. Nicholson Hall, once doomed, now happily faces renovation. Perhaps not the campus's most grand or architecturally significant building, Nicholson is, still, a piece of living history. It has welcomed many generations of students, staff, and faculty into its interior. It has lived through world wars, retrenchment and reallocation, 13 University presidents, 19 U.S presidents, 28 Minnesota governors, and at least 26 legislative sessions.
Thanks to the people of Minnesota, this 19th-century building will be reclaimed and renewed for the 21st century. When its doors open to a new generation of students, its hallways and classrooms will buzz with new technology and the voices of teaching and learning-in at least 45 languages. It will have 110 years' worth of stories to tell, with many more yet to be written.