Style and Structure
Photographed by Charlotte Tian
Structural styles go well beyond the visual; they tell a story about the history and politics of any building. Have you ever walked around campus and wondered why every building seems to have a style all its own? STITCH sat down with Northwestern Art History Professor Emeritus David T. Van Zanten to unveil the hidden mes- sages in the architecture of campus buildings such as Deering Library, University Library and Kellogg Global Hub.
DEERING LIBRARY
Built in 1933 by James Gamble Rogers, Deering Library — the Hogwarts, as people call it— exemplifies gothic revival architecture. The strictly organized limestone, elongated, lancet windows and stone carvings on the facade give the building a grand character. The towers on the four corners of the building, which stand thin and tall, appear castle-like. These towers frame Deering with their height and ornamentation, and in doing so, draw attention to the impressive, gothic facade.
Originally, the library was going to be a “red brick box” according to Van Zanten. But, since the library would be the focal point of the university, Rogers pushed the administration to put in a bit more funding. Van Zanten explains that the reason architects of this period returned to the Gothic style of the 12th to 14th centuries rests in the desire to return to the Anglo style. As more people immigrated to the United States, the “people descendant from the ‘English’ got more and more self-conscious about how they were different,” Van Zanten says. In other words, they were self-conscious about their dominance.
By building neo-gothic buildings on campus, both at Northwestern and many other colleges, “universities sent the message that [they were] for English people, not German, Jewish or Chinese,” Van Zanten says.
For the architects, however, the idea of neo-medieval environments—buildings that are not totally gothic but draw off its concepts—worked to “turn your back on the outside world and create a fantasy,” an Anglo-Saxon dominated one in this case. While today, visitors and students remark highly of the building and note it as the quintessential college building, this structural history gets lost.
While gothic-revival style architecture focuses on ornamentation with its detailed facade and intricate towers, fashion, at the time when the university built the building, did not focus on embellishment, but instead, like the neo-gothic buildings, reverted to an older style that ignored the progress of women’s apparel in the 1920s.
The ‘20s saw shortened, more flashy dress, but the ‘30s saw longer hems, elongated silhouettes and the bias cut, according to the Victoria & Albert Museum (the V&A), the leading museum of art and design in London. The simple, figure-skimming women’s designs revived during this period mirror the revivalism seen in notable architectural ventures of the time, specifically those on elite university campuses.
UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
Constructed in 1966, University Library has a monolithic appearance and reflects Brutalist architecture. Architect Walter Netsch connects the blocks of concrete that compose the library in a jarring manner. He brings the geometric elements together to create a whole, yet the elements still seem disjointed. The library’s defining architectural component is the projecting rooms that make up the upper portion of the building, the towers. The towers’ layers and proximity to each other give the library a geometric appearance.
Netsch considered University Library to be his best work, maybe because it went over budget, a key to great architecture, according to Van Zanten, or because it truly displayed his ideas of modernism. Originally, Norris Student Center did not sit in between the library and the lake — Netsch intended for University Library to overlook the lakefill, being more outland than Deering library, which focused inland.
Netsch became famous for designing the airfare academy in Colorado Springs. At the time, the U.S. had just split the air force from the army, making it its own division. The Air Force represented the future, so its architecture had to as well, Van Zanten says. After the war, like the air force, Northwestern wanted to completely change its image to one of innovation and modernism, Van Zanten continues.
Today many may not regard University Library as highly as Deering, but its central plaza and focus on shape and form made it modern for its time. Netsch’s vision included aerial connectors between new buildings, similar to those between the towers of the library, for the university’s future.
However, his idea clearly never panned out.
Of the same vein, fashion during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s took a turn: style was bold and unique. Architecturally speaking, boldness came from
a stripping down of ornamentation and a focus
on form. But in fashion, boldness manifested in stylized pieces. Although a bit diverging, both styles celebrated modernity. With youth culture on the
rise, fashion reflected many of the youth movements of the time such as the hippies and beatniks. Clothing became accessible to more people, especially young people, says Google’s Art and Culture database, an online platform focused on art education and exploration. Unlike revivalism, clothing “experiment[ed] with colours, patterns and textures borrowed from non-Western cultures,” the V&A says.
Brutalism focuses on the rawness of concrete, or whatever material used, and highlights the “form follows function” principle in the sense that its elements expose the skeleton of the building and function of the space. In contrast, fashion focused
on color and patterns. Yet, both styles challenged previous notions of what buildings and clothes should look like. It’s not surprising that in a time of political and social revolution, art and fashion saw drastic changes.
KELLOGG GLOBAL HUB
One of Northwestern’s newest architectural additions, Kellogg reflects the university’s innovative spirit. Designed by KPMB Architects, Bruce Kuwabara and Marianne McKenna, the Kellogg School of Management’s Global Hub overlooks the lakefill, mirroring the landscape in its curved edges and light-reflective glass facade, symbolic of the lake’s waves, says Kuwabara in an interview with Sarah Aylward on Kellogg’s website. While impressive with its size, internally the building creates an intimate setting for collaboration. According to Kuwabara in the interview, Dean Blount wanted an “excessively public” building. The fluid structure of the building gives way to the openness of the interior and embodies Northwestern’s mission for free and creative thinking. The verticality of each glass window paired with the horizontality of the long window rows causes the building to have an expansive nature.
Whether rain or shine, the building radiates, demonstrating the bright ideas for the future that Kellogg cultivates. According to Kellogg’s website, the building is also environmentally friendly, using “a geothermal area to provide 60 to 70 percent of the energy to heat and cool the building.”
Van Zanten feels that Kellogg is out of scale with the rest of campus buildings. While the interior space excites him, the exterior does not. Yet, when “you walk into that building, everything falls away from a central space,” similarly to University Library’s plaza, he says. Of course, like the other two buildings, Kellogg went over budget.
Looking at how Kellogg coincides with current fashion, comfort seems to be something that stands out. The building relates to comfort in the way it tries to fit seamlessly in its surroundings and provide an open space that encourages collaboration; fashion, on the other hand, finds a focus on comfort by supporting street style, individuality, color and pattern mixing. In this way, physical structure reflects the larger theme of people striving to be the most contemporary and up to date with current trends, from fashion to technology. No one wants to be out of the loop without the classic fuzzy bomber. Similarly, Northwestern doesn’t want to fall behind its competitors with an out of date business school.