It may be a relatively small campus, but UTM is still a large complex of over a dozen buildings.
Having existed in one form or another since the 1920s (and all the way back to the turn of the century if you include the days of the Hall-Moody Institute), UTM has persisted despite the rise and fall of several architectural fashions.
This is readily apparent just on a casual inspection of all the buildings that border the quadrangle, with the imposing columns and classical form of the Hall-Moody Administration building contrasted (rather jarringly, I might add) against the Brutalist superstructure of the Holt Humanities Building.
While I couldn’t possibly talk about every building at UTM, I thought it might be worthwhile to share with you my favorite and least favorite exemplars of architecture that we have on campus and why.
By far the most pleasant building to behold on campus is the aforementioned Hall-Moody Administration Building. While it is not, in fact, the old Administration Building that was the whole of the Hall-Moody Institute in the earlier days, having been built in the late 1950s to replace that structure, it is very much the spiritual successor.
The most obvious feature of the building is its front portico supported by Greco-Roman columns. At once, the facade communicates solidity, classical wisdom and authority, thus signifying its purpose as the headquarters of an institution of higher learning.
And, unlike many of the other older structures on campus, it combines two gable roofs with a long hipped roof, creating a more complex and interesting roof pattern and putting the more classically-appealing gabled roofs in more prominence.
The Hall-Moody Administration Building is not necessarily the most beautiful building I have ever seen, but it definitely presents a more thoughtful and classic image than many of the other structures on campus.
I do not mean to say that some of the uglier structures on campus like the Holt Humanities Building were mistakes or wasteful of money. During the post-war period, UTM was growing rapidly and needed to constantly be adding space for dormitories and classrooms. Unfortunately, the cost of growth seems to have been a sense of taste in architecture.
It was during this period, 1972-1974, that our worst offender was constructed. Gooch Hall looms above the northeastern portion of the quadrangle, a behemoth of brick, glass and poor taste.
When I first saw Gooch Hall, I was reminded immediately of the Charles F. Hurley Building, a government office I had seen once on a trip to Boston. Much like Gooch Hall, that Brutalist mass of poured concrete served to make the casual pedestrian feel like an ant under the magnifying glass of an inhumane structure. That was, after all, why government offices still tend to favor this style of building, poured concrete monstrosities rising up to tower over an insignificant citizenry like the Ministry of Truth from the rubble of Airstrip One.
Gooch has a similar, but altogether different effect. While the Hurley Building puts off a malevolent air, Gooch merely offends one with the sense that it takes up entirely too much space better suited to be occupied by something more beautiful.
Its brick facade, after all, is like putting lipstick on a pig. Save the awkward arch-like structure at the front door and a half-hearted indentation towards the corner, the building has absolutely nothing to break up its blank wall of uniform dullness, much like a single-spaced paper with no paragraphs. A flat roof, of course, only adds to the building’s unique blandness.
To add insult to those injuries, the building is literally a simple rectangle. When working with an exterior palate as limiting as a uniform pattern of bricks with a long swath of windows, a designer’s only recourse to make a building look even remotely interesting is to not build a gigantic box.
Thus I can only conclude that the designer of Gooch Hall derived sick pleasure from visually assaulting every student of this campus, or perhaps just wanted to design something cheap and quick to build that would create the needed space. Probably the latter, but the former seems truer to me.
I look forward to future building projects on campus, resting comfortably with the thought that surely no one could greenlight a building as ugly as Gooch Hall again. Surely.
Photo Credit / University Relations
