Check out one person’s opinion here
I work in a neobrutalist building. I hate it. I look out my window at what would easily be the most-hated building in all of Massachusetts if it weren’t for the fact that the UMass Amherst campus is too far from Boston to be known statewide. This would be the Fine Arts Center (see above), a gigantic nightmare of concrete slaps that look to have been salvaged from the Berlin Wall. It compensates for ugliness by also being leaky, drafty, damp, and soulless. Seeing a performance at the Fine Arts Center has all the intimacy of making love in Aisle Three of your local Wal-Mart, except that Wal-Mart has better lighting.
Preserve this junk? I think not.
What do you think?
In Atlanta, where I was raised, the majority of buildings look like Soviet workers’ housing circa 1952. In comparison, the Concert Hall looks like something from the drafting table of I.M. Pei, making use of the materials at hand.
I find most of the dormitories in central, north and all of southwest much more offensive than the Fine Arts Center. At least the Fine Arts Center makes a dramatic statement. Inside is pretty terrible, though. It’s dark and depressing. I think if I had an office there I would probably hate it too.
I would argue that the inefficient use of open space around Haigis Mall is far “uglier” than the Fine Arts Center. While I am not in love with it’s design, lack of maintenance on the interior is likely the most uncomfortable aspect of the building.
You seem to have a little understanding of architecture, with the emphasis on “little.”
The Fine Arts Center is one of the best buildings from the 1960-1970 era. It is really seven buildings combined into a powerful piece of architectural sculpture. In addition to the concert hall there is the theater department, the theater performance space, the art department and its studios, the music department and its recital hall.
Roche and Dinkeloo, the architects of the building ( and the successors to Eero Saarinen ) consider it one of their best buildings. The building has been conceived as the symbolic gateway to the campus, and the passage under the “studio bridge” is a symbolic link from the student resident hallls to the heart of the campus.
I think you would find making love in the carpeted spaces of the concert hall considerably more comfortable than an aisle in a Wal-Mart. To each his own.
Arnold Friedmann
Professor Emeritus
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
slap some clapboards on that hideous bunker so it looks like all the other bogus pseudo-colonial “architecture” in western mass!!!