Architecture and pacification
I write these words from the math library of Jussieu, on the left bank of the Seine. It is a clean, well-lighted place, with cheerful hardwood veneer tables and daylight streaming in the skylight. Nevertheless, it’s not the kind of place whose grandeur inspires, like the older style reading rooms that Mario Vargas Llosa eulogized. The ceilings are oppressively low, perhaps to save on the cost of construction, and a sunken courtyard has been thoroughly colonized by ragweed and autumn olive, growing disorderly in a heap. The library epitomizes the whole campus: space-age but somehow decrepit and a bit unfriendly. A friend who attended Jussieu told me it was designed after the tumultuous events of 1968, when students occupied most university campuses in France [I have since heard from someone else that Jussieu was almost certainly built a few years earlier than the events of 1968]. With this eventuality in mind, the architect allowed for numerous entrances to each building, and broad unenclosed courtyards, to reduce the possibility of an effective blockade. Perhaps because of this, the campus lacks a clear visual focus (excepting for the surrounding Latin Quarter, which is gorgeous), with no central entrance or portico providing a memorable vista.
It occurs to me that U.S. universities haven’t taken this step, and in fact are returning to more traditional-looking architecture after some experimentation in the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps in part this is because the political activity and organization is so much lower among U.S. students. In a sense, American universities have sanitized their students rather than their architecture. This programme has been so successful, thanks not just to the universities but also to the broader American distrust of political organization, that the fervor of the anti-Vietnam war era is totally gone, replaced with an emphasis on achieving a profitable career. In the current context, constructing new buildings in a classical style serves to retain and strengthen the university’s brand. This is the true goal of many (but not all) American university administrators: to be able to say not just that a student received an education, but that they received our brand of education.
