My university campus, the main campus I should say, since I will blissfully ignore the separate and humongous teaching hospital. Anyways, my campus is mainly just the building - the estate is not much to look at as it’s filled with little streets ideal for biking. The building itself is like a small village within the city I was born in, a village with several restaurants, cafes, and if you venture far enough, you might even find a random store that sells back bags and computer sleeves. The campus, or the building, is a strange mixture of old and newer that they never tried to fluently match together, and its length reaches at least 1 kilometer as I understand. (No wonder the non-academic university staff darts around on scooters, huh?)
When you look at a large part of the main building, you’d think you were looking at a factory. To many, that’s the first thing they see - a box-like building that looks like a place merely full of loud machines and the smell of glues and paints, from above it looks like a micro chip. The exterior is painted in several gaudy, saturated primary colors like green, blue and yellow that make you wonder…why? Then you step inside. And there you face more of those saturated primary colors, painted on thick concrete walls. Most of the signs guiding you to departments and various class rooms are bright yellow and of metal. After seeing pictures of it, a friend of mine told me that it looked like an air port. It sort of does, but a more popular comparison among its pupils is a Soviet factory from the 70s. Funny enough, students have nicknamed that part of the campus Siberia, because it’s cold (I disagree with this). Yes, people scoff at how the building looks. But I have to be honest, I fell in love with it the first time I laid my eyes onto it. I have no real idea why, I am not a fan of primary colors used in…anything. But something about this I liked. This place that we call the old part of the campus has a certain charm to it, maybe it’s the uniquely ugly that made me attracted to it.
Then there is the new part of the campus. When you walk across the factory-like hallways and lobbies, you will come to a hallway, surrounded by glass and support beams, across that you will enter the part of the campus that might just be a polar opposite to “Siberia”. Instead of strong colors and heavy looking doors, everything is white and steel grey. There are large windows to allow light and all the signs are plain steel.
I could draw a deep meaning out of this, sure. Here, see me do it.
The building is divided in two by a glass hallway, much like the university politics seems to be, much like anything in life seems to be. On the old side there are the engineer students, the physicists, the mathematicians, the chemists and what-nots, you know, the useful and hence better-funded fields. While the humanities, the useless, reside (You should know that I use useless and useful terms with a tone of bitterness here). In an ideal world, departments work together, experts from a variety of fields come together to revolutionize the world. In the real world, people look at each other from their own buildings, across a feeble glass hallway, wondering what could have been at best, often forgetting the other side is even there. In the real world these people struggle for funding and the ones that do not come on top complain, and the ones that do get annoyed over the complaining. You know, how almost all fights work.
So, that was one way. Let’s see about another. A friend described it to look like an airport. It would be a suitable metaphor, wouldn’t it? For a university to look like an airport. Much like airports, universities are a stepping stone on our way to somewhere else. Uh, yeah, that’s about it. How about the factory metaphor? Universities trying to churn out professionals fast for the unemployment office, worrying more about getting us out of their hands than about the quality of education we really received and how well equipped we are for the job market. Let’s leave that metaphor at that. This is starting to sound like an astoundingly bitter post.
Ultimately, this strange building houses thousands of extraordinary, and less extraordinary people. People with their own lives, hopes, dreams and problems. Some cry themselves to sleep, some can’t wait for the next day. It’s a fascinating thing to wonder about if you manage to conjure up the energy to look further than yourself and your friends, which I often fail at. Because let’s be honest, even now I’m just writing all this for the sake of Thoughts From Places and I haven’t particularly thought of this stuff before, not really. Well, except for wondering what the designer of the old part of the building was thinking. Now that is actually interesting. Was he inspired by a Soviet factory theme or what on earth?
And sometimes you just find...strange things going on in the building.
