University of Virginia Library

Architecture Finally Considered

(39) But for the two or three thousand who want a year or
two to know more people and more things in more ways,
Birdwood can and should be designed to enhance this
interaction. "Community" is often the word used to indicate
the desired outcome, and this provides the governing principle
for architectural design: openness and multi-purpose as
opposed to isolation, dispersion, stasis, fixed-purpose. An
emphasis on window rather than wall, arcade rather than
corridor, bright colors rather than neutral hues, mixtures of
functions rather than buildings and wings with permanent
designations.

(40) More of the specifics we will touch upon shortly; for
the moment the point is that inexhaustibility in terms of
architecture means that a room, a building, a space of any
kind, is subject to change. It is designed to be flexible enough
to change. Predictability diminishes as flexibility increases; less
predictability means greater possibility for inexhaustibility. To
put it a different way: Boredom and intellectual torpidity arise
when you've gotten out of a place all that it seems to offer,
and you're offered no incentive to probe further, below the
surface.

(41) Hopkins Center for the arts at Dartmouth has
passageways with giant windows opening on the theater
workshop, so that a person who passes here every day sees not
the same tiresome dull wall but rather sets and props in various
stages of design and construction. This is thus an inexhaustible
corridor; on no two days are the same people there working or
exactly the same work being done. If our passer-by happens to
see a friend or classmate in there at work, he may even be
induced to step inside and perhaps learn something about
theater that he did not know before. A small touch, perhaps
(this window wall, this passer-by with his detour), but the
ensemble that we call an ideal campus or community will be
made of many small touches. The point is, they must be
planned—or if not planned (the word may connote excessive
formality and contriving), they must at least be allowed for
and encouraged.