Irvine Campus of the University of California should never have been constructed in the first place. The scale, scope, and impermeability of the architecture is oppressive to the human spirit. Build a university twenty miles from a city, arrange the offices and classrooms so that people can never meet, put the money into parking lots instead of lounges, develop an incentive system around individual achievement ather than common effort, and the result will be an alienating campus.The walled and fortified housing development, the instant campus, the security high school without exterior windows-all are inorganic and monumental. To identify similarities between institutions, for example between prison and zoo, does not mean that they are identical in purpose or conception, any more than it means that prisoners are animals
–
Tight Spaces: Hard Architecture And How To Humanize It
by Robert SommerÂ
This is exactly what I’m talking about. Freak.
Posted 8 months ago & Filed under UCI, Urban Planning, Robert Sommer, Notes