Lynah remodel - keeping up with the Joneses

[Josh '99]

That's an ugly bell tower.

[Scersk '97]

See those two "outbuildings?"  See that red and white vertical "feature?"  They aren't replicated on the other side of the "building"...

[Trotsky]

UM looks like the Bechtel Corporate HQ.

That isn't a compliment.

[ninian '72]

Yup,  I lived a year on North Campus before I got out.  Got a car as soon as I could, to free myself at least on weekends and evenings.  In defense of the Music Building,  Eero Saarinen seems to have designed it from the inside out.  The layout of rehearsal and performance space, studios, and practice and classroom space serves the needs of their large enrollment awfully well.  

The flip side here would be to compare the insipid architecture of North Campus to Mason and Haven Halls (even more nondescript megaboxes) on Central Campus.  Now find a volume of older pictures of the campus, and see what once stood on the Mason/Haven site -  a terrific old building called University Hall that was first dwarfed by Angell Hall and then obliterated by the boxes.  I don't know which is a worse option - destroying whatever character is left on Central Campus or building a satellite campus to handle growth.  There's no good solution for a university that size.  Cornell has done a much better job balancing preservation of its architectural heritage with the need to upgrade facilities.  Replacing Boardman with Olin generated a lot of unhappiness at the time, and hopefully they learned from that mistake how to do this intelligently, eyesores like the Engineering Quad and Uris Hall notwithstanding.

[ninian '72]

Fortuntely there are still a few decent buildings on the Central Campus, even though the architecture tends to be blocky and graceless.  Hill Auditorium, the Rackham Graduate School building, the Hatcher Graduate Library, the Law Quad, and perhaps Angell Hall, which looks like GS on steroids.  I suspect that if the current Michigan planning staff worked for Cornell, most of the Arts Quad would be long gone.

[Josh '99]

[Q]Scersk '97 Wrote:
See those two "outbuildings?"  See that red and white vertical "feature?"  They aren't replicated on the other side of the "building"...[/q]Heh.  I'm beginning to see your point.   ::laugh::

[Scersk '97]

[Q]ninian '72 Wrote:

 Yup,  I lived a year on North Campus before I got out.  Got a car as soon as I could, to free myself at least on weekends and evenings.  In defense of the Music Building,  Eero Saarinen seems to have designed it from the inside out.  The layout of rehearsal and performance space, studios, and practice and classroom space serves the needs of their large enrollment awfully well.
[/q]
Aside from the rehearsal areas and, perhaps, the studios, I actually think that the music building is largely unsuccessful.  Perhaps it served the music school well at one time, but now it's overcrowded and showing its inadequacies.

The classrooms, frankly, are awful to teach in.  The ones on the West side, being below ground level, are dark dingy holes.  The ones on the East side can be nice in the afternoon, when sleepy students can gaze out at the pond and fountain, but are blinding in the morning, forcing the shades to be closed.  Soundproofing seems not to have been a consideration.  Ear-training is difficult.

Being a musicologist (still writing, for those who were wondering), I spent an inordinate amount of time in the library, which is about as schizophrenic of a space as you can find.  The bottom floor gets the most light of any area in the building and the central "atrium" gives the impression of cathedral space.  Nice idea, but it wasn't executed right.  I'm sure that there's a skylight missing.  You can almost feel the cantilevered concrete sagging under the weight of more books than it was designed for.  (And that wasn't many books to begin with.)  It's very noisy, since it's the only pleasant place to "lounge" in the building.

The practice room area is dark, dingy, and, once again, lacks soundproofing.  Many cubicles have been turned into professor's offices to deal with the overcrowding, so supply is scarce.

From a design standpoint, there is far too little natural lighting for public spaces.  The corridors are too wide, wasting space, and too dark--it's like rooting around in a tunnel to find the holes to the outside (classrooms, doors).  There's a very bad flow problem with the central staircase and traffic jams of people often result.  The bathrooms would make the old Soviet Union proud.  In fact, interior-design-wise, the furniture and assorted amenities of the building remind me of the bathrooms.

Nice site, bad building.  Having seen some of Saarinen's other better designs (for example, The Whale and his entry for the Chicago Tribune tower competition), I wonder when he started smoking the big-ugly-box-not-meant-for-people weed.

[nyc94]

[Q]Scersk '97 Wrote:
You can almost feel the cantilevered concrete sagging under the weight of more books than it was designed for.[/q]

Speaking of buildings collapsing, what's the deal with Martha Van Rennselaer Hall?  Wasn't it condemned?  In driving around campus last fall if ever there were a corner of campus to be redeveloped this is it.  I had to look on map to remember/learn the names of these buildings.  My apologies if your major was based here but what the heck goes on in Kinzelberg Hall or Newman Lab?

[billhoward]

[Back from Michigan and diesel shuttles, Olin Library, back more or less On Topic (and it was all fun to read):] A Lynah replacement is out of the question any time soon and perhaps fraught with perils worse than the existing building, like a sterile 6,000-seat arena being locating a long walk from anywhere students live on campus.

A Lynah expansion appears not to be in the near-term offing. But it would be good to keep the topic bubbling (one point of this thread) and in the minds of the athletic department and the administration. Maybe there'll be a biotech boom that surpasses the Internet boom of the 1990s and some happy Class of '87 graduate-now-billionaire whose happiest days were in Lynah will offer up $5- to $10-million to add 1,250 seats at the West End. Cornell would turn that down?

At minimum, the ice has to be good (fixed a couple years ago, right?) and the locker rooms / training area ought to be the equal of at least half the other Top Twenty programs. There's already the huge disadvantage of of no athletic scholarships (assuming the recruit gets in and can stay in) set off the advantage of the Ivy League education.

I should have brought a tape measure to Yale and Princeton to determine seat pitch (distance back of one row to the same place in the row just ahead). Off the cuff, Lynah feels like the last rows of a MD-80 and Yale/Princeton feel like Economy Plus. Yale holds 3400 people, Cornell holds 3800 sardines in red. That is a disadvantage for everyone older than about 25.

To me, the biggest problem is that there are probably 5,000 to 6,000 people who would come (immediately or with a couple years of development work) to most every Cornell game if Cornell continues as a Top Twenty team most years and they can't be accommodated in Lynah now.

[David Harding]

[Q]nyc94 Wrote:

 [Q2]Scersk '97 Wrote:
You can almost feel the cantilevered concrete sagging under the weight of more books than it was designed for.[/Q]
Speaking of buildings collapsing, what's the deal with Martha Van Rennselaer Hall?  Wasn't it condemned?  In driving around campus last fall if ever there were a corner of campus to be redeveloped this is it.  I had to look on map to remember/learn the names of these buildings.  My apologies if your major was based here but what the heck goes on in Kinzelberg Hall or Newman Lab?[/q]

The new wing of Martha Van was condemned several years ago.  It was going to be torn down and rebuilt, but Pataki cut the funds out of the state budget.

Newman Lab is part of the physics department, the particle physics end.  Professors, post docs, and grad students have offices there.  The thory group.  Machine shop.  Drafting room.  Superconducting RF group.  The building behind it on the other side of the drive is connected.  It housed a series of electron synchrotrons until the one under Upper Alumni Field was built in late 1960's.

Kinzelberg Hall is a lecture hall in Division of Nutrional Sciences
http://www.nutrition.cornell.edu/news/s97/namekinz.html

[calgARI '07]

More than anything, I would like to see some sort of renovations that would make section C a student section and therefore unify the entire side as students.

[Rosey]

[Q]calgARI '07 Wrote:

 More than anything, I would like to see some sort of renovations that would make section C a student section and therefore unify the entire side as students.[/q]
I've never understood why they put the boosters on the student side instead of on the townie side.  Clearly, they want a center-ice position, but why break up the student sections?  It's not like they stand up for the entire game.

Kyle

[RichH]

[Q]calgARI '07 Wrote:

 More than anything, I would like to see some sort of renovations that would make section C a student section and therefore unify the entire side as students.[/q]
Amen, Ari.  This is something I can really get behind and would absolutely love to see.

However, this has been brought up before, and the general reaction from boosters has been "no way I'm giving up my center ice seats," which is precisely the same reaction from section M ticket holders when it's suggested to either move the boosters across the ice or flop the students to J-O.  

I've sat in Section C for a couple games this season, and it isn't a fun place to be for various reasons.

[Ben Rocky '04]

If Cornell were to expand the locker-room end of the rink and put seating there, they could make the new sections for students instead of D E F & G.  On top of completely connecting the student section, this would have the added bonus of wrapping students around the end of the ice with the visiting goaltender for two periods, making their life more hellish.

[calgARI '07]

I guess there are a couple options, but really, I think it would be unbelievable if they could get four or five straight sections of students.  It seems inevitable that at some point they will put seats in on scoreboard side.  That will be a good day just because they will be able to get more people in and hopefully join the student sections somehow.