Slower campus construction a good thing

 By Leslie Gehring, leslie.gehring@du.edu

Older buildings on campus have charm

Margery Reed Hall is 80 years old, and it shows. The sinks in the basement bathrooms have separate faucets for hot and cold water. To turn on the lights, there are buttons to push instead of switches to flip. The finicky locks on the doors require not only the right key, but also often patience and a little coaxing to open.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

When I read that DU plans to slow the pace of new building construction, at first I was annoyed: once again, the south end of campus was being ignored. But then I read something that shocked me: over half the buildings on campus are less than 15 years old.

That means that most of campus as we know it did not even exist when this year’s freshmen were born. And that, quite frankly, is sad.

DU’s campus is gorgeous, but the uniform look of all the nice, new brick buildings gives the place the feeling of a cookie-cutter McMansion suburban subdivision. Daniels, Nagel, Nelson, HRTM, the law school, Olin: They all look the same. I’ll take the worn brick of Mary Reed, the sore-thumb architecture of Penrose or the outdated “No Smoking” signs in the computer lab of the Mass Communication building any day. There is something quaint and comforting about older buildings. They’re solid; they’ve withstood the test of time. Sure, they have their quirks, but they also have their histories – often quite interesting ones.

So maybe this slower pace of building will force the builders to think about renovating and restoring the older buildings on campus instead of tearing them down and replacing them with nearby look-alikes. Because the last thing this campus needs is a slew of shiny new red brick buildings.

Readers: What’s your favorite building on the DU campus?