Boos for the Big House

continued

Carl Luckenbach again leads the criticism when talk turns to the School of Public Policy’s Weill Hall. “That’s an ugly building with acute massing problems,” he declares. “It’s extremely ponderous and looms over the intersection. And I question its neotraditional style with its comfortable images of a bygone era that evoke images of childhood. We have a word for that in my profession—‘architectural comfort food.’”

“The main entrance is at State and Hill Street but the parking lot is in the back, so many people are going to come in that way,” comments Strickland. “It raises the question [of] what is the relationship between parking and a building’s entrances. If you have a parking lot in the back of the building, does it not in effect become the de facto face of the building?”

Bob Beckley, too, is disappointed: “I’ve not been in it—and I don’t want to go in it. They said the building on that site would function as a gateway to Central Campus, but in fact it feels rather unwelcoming because it’s just too big.”

Only preservationist Mike Quinn defends Weill Hall—he calls it a “generally successful building. I’m impressed with the quality of the detail and with its relationship to the whole. I’m sometimes concerned that the university presses too much volume into its buildings. But although a floor or two less would have been better, because it’s a government building I think its monumentality is appropriate.”