by Mike Clark-Madison The war room for the University of Texas’ campus master-planners is on the top
floor of the Peter T. Flawn Academic Center, also known as the Undergraduate
Library,
or UGL, to which at least two generations of students have added the inevitable
“Y,” and not without cause. Frzom this aerie, the strategists of the new Forty
Acres have vantage of the old Forty Acres, with its buff stone and red tile
roofs and pervasive sense of architectural grace. But when the chair of the
Faculty Building Advisory Committee, Austin Gleeson, takes you into this
sanctum, he makes you start at his office in Robert Lee Moore Hall (RLM), the
looming nexus of the university’s “nerd corner” and on the short list of the
city’s ugliest buildings, especially on its lemon-yellow inside. The rationale,
it seems, is that the worst should come first, and as you move away from RLM
and toward the Tower, Gleeson delivers a running disquisition on how the
university’s much-admired campus planning went terribly wrong, and how the
current 14-month, $1.1 million planning process aims to make it right again.
Depending on what god-forsaken hulk at the frontier of campus was
your home-away-from-home, you can map your own vector from UT’s hellish fringe
to its, if not heavenly, at least pleasant interior. There’s the communications
school at 26th and the Drag, anchored by the infamous Boxcar, a building which
after rusting for two decades started to hurl jagged chunks of its metal skin
at passing students. There’s Jester Center, the largest dorm in the cosmos and
probably the closest known human analogue to living in a chicken coop. And
there’s the LBJ Library and its attached Sid Richardson Hall, a complex that
musters a faint smidgen, maybe, of the grandeur it was intended to possess – a
building described by one architecture writer, wittily if opaquely, as
resembling “a malevolent flat-headed fish squatting in wait on the ocean
floor.”
Yes, it’s pretty much a no-brainer to assert, as did Gleeson and his Campus
Master Plan Committee, that today’s UT is “an unnecessarily fragmented campus,
both functionally and aesthetically. There is a strong resolve to improve on
the campus character that has been developed over the last 30 years.” Or at
least there is now; Gleeson, also the chair of the physics department, recounts
how concerned members of the campus community have been making noise for at
least a decade about UT’s failures as a built environment. This displeasure,
diffuse if strongly felt, was crystallized when administrators unveiled their
plans for a new Student Services Building, going up right now off of
26th Street. “They wanted to put this huge building up, and expect students to
have to go there routinely, and they put it up on this four-lane highway with
no pedestrian access,” Gleeson says in a clipped East Coast brogue that
accentuates his disgust. “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Alas, the president of the university at the time was Bill Cunningham, the
cultural descendant of a long line of UT kingpins – presidents Stephen Spurr,
Lorene Rogers, and Peter Flawn, and Regents chair Frank Erwin – whose fantasies
of an independent and omnipotent “multiversity” led to UT’s fragmenting in the
first place. Now kicked upstairs to the chancellorship of the UT System,
Cunningham as president displayed a seemingly innate talent for alienating the
majority of the 75,000 or so members of the UT community. “Cunningham preferred
to work through a small circle of administrators and never listened to the
faculty,” Gleeson notes, adding that the advice offered by the Faculty Building
Advisory Committee (FBAC) was seldom if ever heeded during Cunningham’s
tenure.
Gleeson and his committee, along with voices from the student
community, from staff, from adjacent neighborhoods, and from the university’s
own well-regarded School of Architecture, coalesced around the goal of a new
master plan about the time Cunningham was taking his leave. The idea percolated
until current president Robert Berdahl arrived from the University of Illinois.
“When Berdahl got here, they had just completed a master plan at Illinois, so
he was incredibly receptive,” Gleeson says. One of Berdahl’s earliest official
acts, in September of 1993, was to appoint the Campus Master Plan Committee; a
year later, the University hired A-list architect Cesar Pelli and his firm to
create the plan, which is set for approval by the Board of Regents at their
January meeting.
The whole idea idea of a master plan – imposing order on a chaotic world and
perfecting the human-crafted environment – encapsulates all the ideals and
values that make architecture sexy and inspirational and mystical and a fit
subject for Ayn Rand. The UT gig, its ample recompense aside, attracted
attention from ranks of architects comparable to Pelli in stature. But then, it
always has. Until the early 1970s – the point at which ill-conceived modern
monoliths started to spring up like mushrooms around the edges of the Forty
Acres – UT managed its growth with the help of a succession of consulting
architects, many of whom could have been doing something more lucrative and
glamorous.
Most of what we see in the original Forty Acres – the portion of
campus between 21st and 24th Streets, the Drag and Speedway, formerly Lampasas
Street – is the work of two of those consulting architects. The first serious
attempt to master-plan the campus – or at least the first attempt to find favor
with the Regents – was undertaken around 1910 by Cass Gilbert, who to this day
remains a big name in American architectural history. Compared to the early
skyscrapers and public monoliths on which his fame rests – the Supreme Court
Building in D.C., the Woolworth Building and George Washington Bridge in New
York – Gilbert’s contributions to the UT campus, of which Battle and Sutton
Halls are still standing, were miniatures. But their style – the vaguely
Spanish red-tile-roof and limestone look – set the tone for the rest of the
core campus. Battle, built in 1911 as the first university library, is the
second-oldest building on the main UT campus, the oldest being the pre-Gilbert
1904 Student Services Building, adjacent to the Tower. The latter – which
despite its antiquity isn’t a particularly “important” building – is currently
undergoing major structural renovation, costing more than $250 a square foot,
and is destined to be the development wing, where donors are f�ted and
impressed.
While the buildings themselves proved a powerful influence, Gilbert’s actual
plan was never really followed, and is completely indiscernible in UT’s
modern-day footprint. It instead fell to Paul Philippe Cret (pronounced
“Cray”), UT’s consulting architect from 1930 to 1950, to take the Gilbert look
and generalize it into a complete campus, whose virtues have only lately been
obscured by the school’s latter day sprawl. Cret, a French emigr� based
in Philadelphia, had a similar pedigree as Gilbert, with prestigious D.C.
commissions (the Folger Library) and progressive urban fixtures (Philly’s
Delaware River Bridge). Unlike his predecessor, he got to work on the same
scale in Austin; such campus landmarks as the Tower, the Texas Union, Mary
Gearing Hall, and the Texas Memorial Museum are all Cret’s handiwork. Even the
snorting beasts of the Littlefield Fountain, sculpted by Pompeo Coppini, were
sited by Cret in a manner that much displeased their creator. (From the
description of what Coppini had in mind, though – laden with hokey symbolism
about the reunion of North and South, or somesuch – we all owe Cret an extra
debt of gratitude.)
Beyond the structures themselves, Cret created the axis of malls that
intersect at the Tower, articulated the desired size and density of future
campus buildings, and codified the UT look: a hybrid of Mediterranean
influences, classical elements, and Moderne “WPA style,” so familiar to
Austinites that we forget how unique it is, and how much better it looks than
most developments of similar vintage (for example, Dallas’ Fair Park). It’s no
accident that, despite its age and density and far distance from many of UT’s
major activities, the core of campus is where everyone hangs out. Gleeson notes
that, in the standard survey he uses to garner input, he asks respondents to
identify what part of campus works best. “By a huge margin, the answer is the
original Forty Acres,” he says. “It’s the most used and dense and still the
most successful – it’s not only attractive but functional. This portion” – he
picks up the miniature cardboard Tower on the master-plan model – “works. This
portion” – he picks up Robert Lee Moore Hall – “doesn’t work.”
The “Cret aesthetic” is the
sacred text of the current master-plan effort – its presentation packet is
graced by Cret’s original drawing for the Tower, and the mid-point status
report asserts that “hardly anyone can come to campus and not feel the impact
of Cret’s careful, well-scaled design.” Following this quote are the two most
telling words in the whole document: “For contrast, Figure 3 shows the current
status of the campus.” (Figure 3 is the standard-issue campus map with the
little three-letter codes.) The $64 question – or the $1.1 million question –
is how the Cret aesthetic can be imposed on the rest of UT’s 357 acres. It’s
easy enough to say that future UT construction should look like it belongs on
campus – at present, the war room is papered with photos of architectural
details that please the Pelli team, and with drawings that translate this array
of porticos, window arrays, grillwork, and roof pitches into design guidelines
for future construction. But that still leaves RLM and the Boxcar and the
nascent Student Services behemoth.
It is in the latter light that the choice of Pelli makes the most sense, given
that the architect’s most famous commissions – New York’s Museum of Modern Art,
or the corporate headquarters for the COMSAT telecom consortium and for
high-tech giant Teledyne – aptly symbolize his aesthetic. While a resolute
modernist, Pelli’s repute within the trade rests more on mixed-purpose
developments, integrated structures and landscapes, and the like – exactly the
sort of portfolio UT needs. Plus, his co-principal, Fred Clark, is a Texas Ex.
“They presented what was undoubtedly the most robust vision of the future,”
says Gleeson.
Before hiring Pelli, the committee had narrowed down its discontents into a
list of main planning considerations. Foremost among them was a desire to
regain a sense of campus community, with open and public spaces that would
bring the engineering geeks in RLM together with the creative slackers in the
nearby Fine Arts Complex, for example. Another main goal was to make better use
of existing buildings in the core campus, and meet the university’s inexorable
space needs with infill, rather than marching across Central Austin over the
corpses of once-distant neighborhoods. Other specifications include the
creation of the sort of design guidelines currently in progress, improved
attention to mobility and infrastructure needs, and much better “wayfinding”
around the chaotic campus.
And then there’s the following, words many Austinites never thought
they’d see printed on UT letterhead: “The campus does not exist as an island in
the city, but… depends heavily on residential, commercial and institutional
environments around it. The campus must have strong functional connections to
its surroundings.” When Bob Berdahl moves on to greener pastures, he will be
remembered as perhaps the first UT president ever, certainly the first in most
students’ lifetimes, to notice that there’s a big city out there, and that 90%
of its residents do not rely on UT to make their lives complete, and that many
of them see, in the failings of the UT campus, the arrogance of the university
writ large in bricks and mortar. It is, after all, the gross, ugly parts of
campus that outsiders have to see every day – the nicer parts are walled off
from the Drag, which, with its seemingly endemic crowds, dirt, and miscreance,
itself forms a cultural wall between Longhornland and the rest of Austin.
The disjunction between town and gown involves more than just the campus’
homeliness; the school’s actual location, sitting like Jabba the Hutt atop (or
very near) Austin’s geographic center, has for years given the city and its
citizens fits. When Edwin Waller surveyed Austin back in 1839, what he called
“College Hill” was a long way off from the center of town, which petered out
into a fringe of farmsteads along North Avenue, today’s 15th Street. Even by
the time UT was actually established on that site, in 1882, the campus was
still some distance from the action, and neighborhoods like Hyde Park that
flanked it were considered bona fide suburbs. Such siting is more-or-less
typical of big schools in big cities – off to one side, in a separate and
easily defined “university district” that, though it may be comparatively
central, ain’t downtown.
Not only is UT downtown – or at least within the big-D Downtown of current
vogue – but its land use patterns would be unconscionable on most other
campuses, or for that matter most other city centers. You can, if deemed
worthy, drive right up to your building? But you can’t go through campus, even
though it blocks the city’s street grid? There are how many surface parking
spaces on campus? 12,000 or more? And maybe 0.5% of them are dedicated to
public use, even though the campus contains a clutch of sports and
entertainment venues? There’s no mass transit within the campus? Not even bike
lanes? How many students can live on campus? Less than half of the freshman
class? The fact that UT, with its most uncompact ways, occupies the heart of
the wannabe-compact city poses a paradox – the university provides Central
Austin with many of its Big-Time amenities, but also many of its limitations:
the congestion, skewed demographics, upward pressure on rents and downward
pressure on neighborhoods and housing stock, and horrendous traffic problems.
All these concerns are clearly understood, if not given primacy, by both UT’s planners and the Pelli team;
many of the big-news changes in the plan-as-now-conceived would help make the
campus not only a better thing but a better place, improving it both as an
institution (which matters little to the bulk of Austin citizens) and as a
neighborhood (which matters a great deal). For example, the planners seem dead
serious about making the UT area as vehicle-free as possible. The plan calls
for eliminating traffic entirely on 24th Street and on Speedway; reconfiguring
the Guadalupe and 26th Street margins of campus with plazas, ample pedestrian
amenities, green fingers and the like, to make them streets instead of
highways; and shifting at least half of the current surface parking to new
garages at the periphery of campus.
Along with these moves go elaborate revisions and upgrades to the transit
situation – new shuttles, better shuttles, real bus stops on campus,
people-mover systems within campus (successor to the ill-fated propane-powered
trams of several years back, which Gleeson calls “the Disney trains”), a whole
new (and probably too extensive, truth be told) infrastructure for bicyclists,
all with the light-rail cherry on top. This last move represents at least a
small turnaround; when Capital Metro first pitched light rail back in 1991, the
plan met with vivid hostility from West Campus businesses and telling silence
from most of the UT power structure. The new draft plan includes, in the
planners’ view, both better routing through the campus area and more useful
connections between campus, the Riverside Drive student ghetto, and Bergstrom
Airport-to-be.
The campus acreage now devoted to unwanted surface parking, along with a
number of the kinda useless open spaces left as remnants from the
temple-building of the 1970s and Eighties, is slated by the Pelli people for
infill development, which they expect to add 4.7 million gross square feet to
the UT physical plant, or a 30% increase over the current total. This is
expected to eliminate the need for further land grabs for at least 25 more
years, though the school would still pick up odd lots in between its current
holdings and may, at some point, still have to move activities out to its
satellite holdings like the Pickle Campus (formerly Balcones Research Center),
the Brackenridge Tract along Town Lake, and the Whitaker Field sports complex
on 51st Street. (Under the plan, which pretty much eliminates the few
rec-sports fields remaining on campus, all intramurals would have to be
consolidated at Whitaker.)
On the sprawling 3-D model created by the Pelli team – which, for now, seems
to be the only real campus-wide map illustrating the plan – the existing
structures are white, and the new structures beige; the infill spreads across
campus like an inkblot, filling in bunches of odd nooks and crannies that,
right now, you scarcely realize are available open space. For example, the
space in front of Jester and the Perry-Casta�eda Library, on either side
of Speedway just north of MLK, is slated to accommodate half a dozen new dorm
buildings, a portion of the many thousands of new residential units – double
what’s available now – that are incorporated into the plan. Another long string
of linked low-rise buildings arcs along Waller Creek, skirting the edge of what
is now Clark Field. Most of the new buildings, both dorms and otherwise, are
much smaller than what currently exists on campus; indeed, Gleeson notes, the
Pelli team was sent back to its drafting tables after their first massing
study, since none of the buildings they proposed was large enough to hold
either the psychology department or the Huntington Art Gallery, both of which
are on the short list for new homes.
Actually, aside from the dorm
spaces, few if any of the proposed infill structures have a specific purpose in
mind; in planning-speak, they are “unprogrammed.” “This is the problem with a
lot of these new buildings we have,” Gleeson says, referring to RLM, et
al. “They’re all so heavily programmed you can’t do anything else with
them, which is not how the Cret plan works. All those academic buildings have
changed their uses several times and can do so again. That’s what we’re looking
for.” Tying much of this together is a sort of superstructure for the campus, a
zone-based concept in which different areas, linked to different gateways,
perform different functions for different people. To wit, the current
pedestrian entrance beside the Union, off the Drag, becomes a much larger
walk-in gateway, the prospective student entrance. Campus visitors, who
currently are encouraged to enter campus from its desolate eastern side, would
instead come up a fully landscaped University Avenue, with a gateway right by
the Littlefield Fountain. Staff and faculty would come in at Congress/Speedway
and MLK, from which they could easily reach parking garages. And the hoi polloi
coming to football games and the like – given that most of those facilities are
in the eastern third of campus – would enter through a new Manor Road gateway,
which would connect all the way across I-35 and would indeed have its own exit
on the Interstate, in lieu of the current 26th Street offramp. (The Texas
Department of Transportation apparently thinks this is a great idea.)
The Campus Master Plan appears to have addressed many of the obvious failures
and inadequacies of UT’s planning heretofore, and its creators are discernibly,
and justifiably, proud of themselves. But will it actually happen? One way in
which the planners hope to ensure some follow-through and continuity is by
writing into the plan a set of instructions – how to pick architects for
building projects, how to implement different elements over time, and what
dimensions of the plan need further study (traffic patterns being the most
manifest). “We can make a plan that will work, and build support for efforts to
make it work,” says Gleeson. “But it won’t work all by itself. This will be an
ongoing process; before we can really create this vision, we have a long way to
go.” n
This article appears in September 22 • 1995 and September 22 • 1995 (Cover).