This department is/was housed in one of the few towers on campus. The building is early Style Moderne: it has a sleek limestone exterior with bas-relief details and a hipped copper roof. The uppermost floor (14th? 15th?) has large dormer windows that look out over Ellesiouville. It is/was a popular place to take job candidates and prospective graduate students to show them the lay of the land.
The building is being "renovated." This is both good and bad. Good: a large 1950s-era concrete tumor of breathtaking hideosity was removed from the building's ass. Bad: removing the tumor revealed more of the building's architecturally-significant details, details that were destroyed less than a week after they were uncovered to make way for new windows, doors and stairwells. Bad: a new concrete tumor, more pleasing in design but a tumor nonetheless, is being reaffixed to the building's ass. Bad: the front of the building once boasted two graceful, curving limestone wings (with lots of interior woodwork) that housed the main offices of the department, and they were removed to make the building consistent with its new ass.
Where is the department during the renovation? They have been widely dispersed across Ellesiouville, most in a warehouse several miles away, near some of LSU's experimental farms.
LSU denizens are not allowed to play.
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
23 comments:
My guess would be engineering. Computer and/or electrical engineering.
Let's see...
Concrete tumour... gotta be for academics. It's an academic department.
Dispersal... hmm, it's got to be an academic department that would be particularly inconvenienced by the dispersal... I'd say one with labs. Some kind of science labs. Not necessarily the biggest science department, but a department with, if not labs specifically, some kind of equipment.
Anywhere close?
I'm going to guess Financial Aid/Enrollment Services.
I think Anonymous is on the right track with the remark that the department would be inconvenienced by dispersal. I'll recuse myself.
I'm gonna guess Architecture, actually. The tragedy of uncovering and then destroying neat building features, and displacing the department to the boonies for the duration.... karma.
Hmmm - my thought was actually that it was the student union and the dispersed staff were all the catering services group...
Psychological/counseling services.
I'm going with literature/English/foreign languages. Every college I've ever been at put those departments in the tallest building. (And they love it for the whole 'ivory tower' thing.) Plus, labs don't usually go in really tall buildings.
Sounds like the psychology building at my LSU (which is not the same LSU as AP's).
Nursing?
I'll go with archetecture.
Hmmm... perhaps a hint is in order. The dispersal is not only massively inconvenient, it undermines the department's research activities and is anathema to the purpose of having such a department in the first place.
Sociology?
interdisciplinary studies?
Communications or Public Affairs?
Hmm, maybe something like biomedical engineering or nuclear energy research?
library science, with little libraries scattered throughout the experimental farms.
education, with little daycares scattered as above...
ok, ignoring the tumors.
I was also thinking Foreign Languages. The ass would be the language lab and it is true, they always put Foreign Languages in some kind of tower.
But if the dispersal is disrupting research in some really specific way, is it then a science building, whose labs have been shut down? Or is it the art department, and have the artists been separated from their studios?
Chemistry.
Hugely inconvenient dispersal of lab space, and yet originally a nice, solid academic department in a high-profile, showpiece building, with unfortunate concrete-ass add-on which might've been some sort of concession to modern research methods or infrastructure needs.
Seen it before. It's all about the buildings, not the intellectual content of the humans inside them.
Social Psychology?
anthropology?
Aaaand we have a winner! Yes, it is the library! All the books and journals are carefully packed away for the multi-year duration of the renovation. They can be requested, but expect to wait a weeks or two to get them.
Wow... our large monolithic limestone library is under construction too...
Must be a plague of monolithic library renovations going on at LSU's everywhere...
Post a Comment