I largely agree with Professor Martinez’s sentiments regarding Tufts’ architecture and its capacity to stand in for a university’s reputation. The prompt posed to us is an interesting one, but I find myself asking more questions than having immediate answers. First, what do we mean when we say “Tufts’ architecture?” I assume rather than individual buildings, we are discussing these in terms of a collective whole, i.e., the architecture of a “campus.” Thus, I suspect the intention is to make a case either for starchitect eclecticism (à la MIT) or stately homogeneity (à la Harvard, kind of). And yet, like Professor Martinez, I’m not convinced we need either one. Why must an organization, and by extension, a campus, have an architectural brand to be trotted around like a mascot on a field or a typeface on a tumbler? Is this what we want in our architecture and, more generally, in our built environment?
Let’s look at the architecture of the world around us. By this, I mean the building stock outside the confines of a campus. There are “good” buildings and “bad” buildings, short ones and tall ones, shiny new ones and worn-out old ones. Starchitect buildings and non-starchitect buildings. The architecture of our world is nothing more than the materialization of cultural collisions. I like the brutal concrete ziggurats, and I like the storefronts with oversized awnings and rusty wrought-iron railings. I like the fully glazed curtain-wall towers, and I like the hodgepodge houses with glass block windows and faux stone cladding. I like them because I believe every building has the capacity to uniquely teach us about culture, history, materiality, structure, and the way we organize and live as social beings. And I like them all the more because of their deliriously haphazard juxtapositions, a multi-authored landscape with a refusal—or inability—to be pigeon-holed into a singular style.
Now, we look at the architecture of Tufts. Although Professor Martinez may be right in that we might lack the Goddard Chapel of our era, we undoubtedly have our fair share of trophies. Martinez already named several—of which Olin is absolutely brilliant…with its “cheeky postmodernism” and its nuanced ability to serve as a hinge point that reconciles two misaligned campus grids…I could go on about this building—and we could add the Arthur Murray Chemistry Laboratory, the Campus Energy Plant, Lewis Hall, the Memorial Steps, the list goes on…(side note: if you don’t think these are trophies, let’s talk.) We also have our “not-trophies.” At any given moment, you’re no more than a stones-throw from an anonymously authored triple-decker that serves as a classroom or departmental office. And, you can’t avoid the Mayer Campus Center, a building that seems to give “summer camp” vibes both inside and out. We find that Tufts contains architecture at the extremes and everything in between. The campus is less a campus than a microcosm or cross-section of the built environment we encounter in our everyday lives.
While I am still in alignment with Professor Martinez in questioning whether architecture should indeed serve as a manifestation of a reputation, let us assume it will. If a campus must stand in for something, then a reputation that models itself after the realities of our world—filled with rank-and-file and blue-chip buildings and everything in between—certainly seems like something I could get behind.
Photo by TJ Reiter