A very fancy brochure landed in my mailbox last week, announcing my law school's "centennial capital campaign". It's quite a production: full-color photos, impeccably rendered on heavyweight paper (some pages glossy, some pages matte), with inset pages of varying sizes, all bound together with black wire in a notebook spiral. At some point I stopped gawking at the graphics and started reading the contents. This quote, from a former bankruptcy law professor of mine, caught my attention:
Along with the St. Louis Arch and Dulles International Airport, the Laird Bell Quadrangle is an iconic example of Eero Saarinen's work. For it, Saarinen labored mightily to create a distinctive architectural vocabulary, beginning with repetitions and variations on a 9' by 9' grid throughout the building. These are architectural analogues to the 12-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg. Saarinen dubbed the style "neo-Gothic." Unlike the stained glass windows of Gothic cathedrals, light streams outwards from inside the building and looks most spectacular at night, a feature used at the Pompidou Center in Paris as well.Here's the building. And the Schoenberg reference really explains why, all in all, I much prefer the gothic-Gothic architecture on the other side of the Midway. I think this quote is very cool, though, not the least because it comes from a professor who once posed the koan: "What's the difference between a Hostess Cupcake and a Ho-Ho? And does it really matter?", and who made frequent, fond reference to Malaga coolers from A New Leaf. (Somewhat more relevant is that I've managed to maintain a decent understanding of and interest in bankruptcy law developments over the intervening years, even though it's not the area in which I practice.) So while I'm hardly in a position to say, endow a chair, maybe I'll be good for a gross of carpenter's wood glue. Development offices of institutions of higher education, take note.