Another Echo of History [To Rally Discussion]

To Rally Discussion Another Echo of History John McKean registered newer “deconstructive” architectural trends, but for the most part its central buildings are three or four stories high with broad, welcom- ing stairways at their fronts. The name “Gateway Center” is perhaps more revealing than intended. It is meant to signal that these new buildings will be the entrance to OSU, a kind of formal welcoming zone between town and campus. But, as the historian Jacques Le Goff has observed, gateways serve two functions: they allow entrance and deny entrance, they invite and repel. As it stands now, the Gateway Center, with its planned office spaces and mall stores, does not do what a gateway to a university should do: namely, invite one into an area where people gather to talk, read, think, experiment, create, argue, and, most of all, share their work. The Gateway Center does not offer a symbolically appropriate entry into a public univer- sity that is the largest in Ohio and one of the two or three largest in North America. If anything, it reads like office space for the various insurance companies that have made Columbus a center of that industry. Perhaps, though, the Gateway Center will come in time to seem a cutting-edge statement, one that announces how the university is less a place for independent intellectual and artistic life than a subsidiary of corporate culture. If so, the Gateway Center will seem a successful piece of site planning. In the meantime, it threatens to become a barrier between the university and the community sur- rounding it. In the recent issue of Places on “Con- sidering the Place of Campus,” it was interesting to read Henry Millon’s historical review of the 1968 work on Italian university campuses by archi- tect Giancarlo De Carlo (“The Echo of history,” Vol. 17, No. 1, Spring 2005). For those without easy com- prehension or access to the volume he discusses, I might flag another fascinating essay by De Carlo—more abstract perhaps, but very much part of the same train of thought. Entitled “Why/How to Build School Build- ings: Order-Institution vs. Education- Disorder,” it appeared in Harvard Educational Review, No. 4 (1969), pp. New in Paperback Modern Landscapes for Living MARC TREIB AND DOROTHEE IMBERT Garrett Eckbo “This delightfully designed book is a tribute….A recom- mended detailed case study for those interested in the Modern Movement and the development of Modernism in landscape design in the U.S. Impeccable sources include Eckbo himself as well as comprehensive archives of his drawings. It is enriched with many early drawings and site photographs, a biographical and professional chronology and a contemporaneous biography.” —Architectural Review Winner of the Honor Award in the Communications category of the 1997 American Society of Landscape Architects Professional Awards Program $24.95 paper At bookstores or order (800) 822-6657 • www.ucpress.edu Places 17.3