Update (July 23, 2014): It’s even worse than I thought! I still haven’t ventured into the new library because it would be sad for me, but you can see what the “modern” version looks like here. The design firm was Woodhouse Tinucci Architects.
Eckhart Hall (built 1930, it is the campus’s sole Charles Klauder building, an architect best known for the University of Pittsburgh’s “Cathedral of Learning”) is in my top five of campus buildings. I’ve never figured out why I like it so much. It may be the narrow proportions of the windows. It may be the perfect naturalness of the ivy cover. I even think it’s perfect on the inside, although if I were a Mathematics or Statistics major I would likely feel differently. Like the Oriental Institute, it is one of only a few buildings on campus that is more or less unchanged from when it was built.
Renovations for academic reasons should always be able to go forward unhindered. Respect for architecture is a very silly reason to prevent an academic institution from doing its job (I’m thinking now of the controversy over Northwestern’s plans to demolish its aging Prentice Women’s Hospital, designed by Bertrand Goldberg and completed in 1975). But despite this core tenet of mine, I am getting very sad about a recent announcement that six new Math and Stat faculty offices will be grafted onto the charming second-floor Eckhart Library. The details are unclear, but the “major” renovation and reconfiguration is likely to significantly shrink and change the appearance of this classic space. The books will go, while the study space will stay. (The terrific “In” and “Out” doors will probably stay too–a silver lining.) So, like Harper, it will be another campus “library” without any books. Oh, well. Crescat scientia; vita excolatur and all that.
But I do wonder how necessary this project is for the Math and Stat Departments. Plenty of other departments have faculty offices in buildings that are not their departments’ home bases. Could Eckhart Library’s fate have been avoided with a more creative plan for increasing space, or a more thorough search for space nearby?
Here’s an old photo. It looks exactly the same today as in the photo. But not come Fall Quarter.
The Campus Review 
