As I was pushing Emily home a couple of days ago, I couldn't help but notice, yet again, how ugly the UCSB campus is. It's in a gorgeous location, but they've made a mess of it. When the prettiest structures on campus are the parking garages, you know you've gone wrong. It's hard to single out one particular building for crimes against architecture, but the administration building might be the ugliest: it resembles, apparently deliberately, a prison, with narrow slits for windows (did the architect consider the scenery outside distracting to cubicle-bound bureaucrats?) and lots of steel.
It seems to embody the message administrators usually send to college students: please don't bother us. Just pay your bill and get out. They should tear everything down and start over. There is a lot of construction now(it's hard for me to teach my class over the noise, which also seems symbolic somehow), but they're probably just putting up more ugly buildings. There is one new science building with lots of glass that I like a lot. I'll try to take a picture of it and post it.
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