Pedestrian Perspective: University at Albany - Uptown Campus

Welcome to the Albany main campus of SUNY, which in this case stands for the Soviet University of New York.

The walk from the bus stop.  Very inviting.  It wasn't actually cloudy that day; a perpetual fog hangs over the institution.  (Just kidding!)  (Kinda)

The University at Albany was designed during the height of the Crappy Inhuman Modernist Building Movement, by architect Edward Durrell Stone.  Built over a two-year period from 1956-1958, it has now tortured and demeaned students for over fifty years. 

Entering SUNY.  A grandiose mixture of concrete and intimidation built for a warm climate.  However, this isn't one.  It's New York.  Enter wind.

Someone was compensating...

This is the plaza where people hang out.  At least, people were probably present here in the renderings in 1956.  In reality, it repels all but the squirrels, who have the generosity of heart to make any place their home.

The fountain.  One of the few part of campus that students love.  Mostly for Fountain Day, an excuse to get wasted at noon on campus.  This past year was the last opportunity for the next few years, due to construction, for Fountain Day to be held.  It was canceled, however, for reasons outlined below.

On Saint Patrick's Day weekend 2011, a group of hundreds of UAlbany students rioted in the streets of the "Student Ghetto", bordered roughly by Lake Ave on the east, Partridge Street on the west, Morris Street on the south and Washington Ave on the north.  Most of the rioting occurred around Hudson Ave and Quail St, and made national news.  Over 40 students were arrested, many from the numerous videos that were taken of the event, which included students tipping over cars and countless other acts of property damage.  Finding the videos and news coverage is easy, just Google "Kegs and Eggs Albany".

After the riots, UAlbany canceled Fountain Day, sparking further protests and property damage on the uptown campus itself.  Some students spray painted some columns, while a non-traditional (meaning older) student got stoned and chained himself to the fountain for a couple of days.

No word yet on how much our degrees will be worth after all this ridiculousness.

In this shot, you can see the sheer size of the erect penis sculpture obelisk, as well as the lower level of the podium.  The lecture center can be found here.

This landscaping isn't really helping.

Overall, the University at Albany Uptown Campus is a suburban piece of inhospitable garbage plopped ungracefully into the City of Albany.  It adjoins the Harriman State Office Campus, which is arguably worse, though slated for renewal.  That's a topic for another post.

Students!! OMG!!! Of course, they are avoiding their designated hang out area.

This trash can looks like it just wants to swallow the campus whole.

This is the standard size of the windows on campus, including, I believe, in the dorms, which consist of four towers surrounding the main podium, each contained within their own mini-podium.  It's arguable that the windows are this narrow to prevent suicides.  College students occasionally do that anyway - college can be a very turbulent time - and a campus like this certainly doesn't help.

Every disgusting and demeaning suburban campus must have oceans of parking.  Even urban campuses have too much, but you could fit the entire Saint Rose campus into one of UAlbany's parking lots.

You can see one of the residential towers in the background.

Who doesn't want to cross a hamster-cage-bedding moat to get to the sitting area?  Sign me up!

Turns out that chain they put up to keep people out of here is super easy to step over.

The stairs to underneath the podium.

Another view of the stairs.

This is...interesting.  Clearly they didn't want this art project to be seen by anyone, so they hid it under a stairway.

Things are about to get ugly.  I know it's a shock that they weren't already.

Okay, listen.  This isn't a pedestrian perspective complaint.  But if a door needs to be pulled, give it a damn handle, not a push bar.  These deceptive doors just piss me off.

At this point in my travels through the campus, I decided to go inside the Lecture Center, underneath the podium.

I've been visiting this campus since before I moved to Albany three years ago, I performed and rehearsed here after moving and this is my second semester as a student at this college.  Last semester I even took a transportation planning class on the uptown campus (the classes for my major are downtown), as well as doing almost all of my essay writing here.  It can be objectively stated that I've spent quite a bit of time on this campus.

And yet, I got lost trying to find the main hallway.  Horribly, horribly lost.  There are no pictures of that part, because I was concentrating on finding where I was going.

I was looking for the way into the tunnel.  Finally, I found it:

I barely even found it in the end.  This tiny little sign is the only direction I found, after going through a maze of hallways.

That is not a typo.  We are actually talking about the maintenance tunnel here.  It is a primary route for students to get across campus, especially in winter, on a campus designed for the Mediterranean.

Let's go take a look a this route, and the charm it exudes.  Remember, while we are here, the impressionable and still maturing minds of the young people that this campus is intended to shape.

.....are you serious?

Yes, serious as can be...

You can get lost very easily down here.  The university has kindly put out chairs for those students.  We'll see vending machines later for those students making a day trip out of navigating the tunnel.

They've even included hills!  Why, it's just like San Fransisco.  If San Fransisco was a Soviet bunker.

The descent.

Going to the Lecture Center.

This is no joke.  We're still in the maintenance tunnel here.  And there is directional signage, of the same sort that you find inside the buildings.

A full underground campus map even!

Whenever I walk through here I'm reminded of playing the Goldeneye James Bond game for Nintendo64 as a teenager.  Only the video game was more fun.

Although, I suppose, with the right group of people, and some props, we could recreate that pretty adequately.  But that's my point.  A properly built environment does not need props or an overactive imagination to be bearable.

At the very least, students should not be expected to traverse a university campus via the maintenance tunnels with signs cautioning against moving vehicles.

Charming.

Ventilation ducts for ambiance.

This is disconcerting.

Is this where they keep the missiles?

I'm sure quite a bit of fine art was inspired here.

These tubes are for the nerve gas.  In the 60s, students sometimes got out of line.

That last joke wasn't too far from the truth.  One theory on the construction of this campus, especially at the time during which it was constructed, holds that it was partially intended to not provide any central public meeting spaces for students to gather.  This was a time of great civil unrest, with much of it occurring on college campuses.

This Google Map shows an aerial view of the campus.  As you can see, there are some large areas that students can gather in, but none that are in the center of the campus.  All are peripheral.  Even the fountain, in which hundreds of students gather during years that Fountain Day is not canceled due to riots, is not a sufficient place to hold a protest.

The large green spaces that you see are all far removed from academic areas and dorm areas.  Most are athletic fields.  The large circle at the top, Collins Circle, is the closest thing that could serve this purpose.  But it is still peripheral, wedged between an access road (far from the academic podium; any buildings near it are newer than the original campus by at least thirty years) and Washington Avenue, a six-laner that is effectively a highway.

Compare the above map to another Albany campus at The College of Saint Rose.  Notice the central quad at Saint Rose, surrounded by college buildings.  (The two maps are are not at the same scale.)

Maybe these are where they keep the missiles.  I bet the get them out with giant magnets.

Even the maintenance areas use bro language.

Anyone care for a snack?

I think it would be fun to find some nook in one of these tunnels and live there, just to see how long I could get away with it for.

Chain link ornamentation.

Can anyone direct me to Biology?

The sidewalk.  No, really, this is where we're supposed to walk.  No one ever does, of course. 

Not that it makes much difference if we walk in the appropriate lane or not, when these things are parked there.

Oh my god they even have a Red Phone.

While I did intend to take a full walk through the tunnels for this blog post, instead of just the route I normally take to the Campus Center, it should be mentioned that I actually was lost at this point.  It had happened to me once before, so I knew that it was essentially a large circle and I would eventually come to my destination, but until I finally saw a sign for it, I had no idea when this might happen.  The problem arose when I entered the tunnel from an unfamiliar direction (and after getting lost trying to find my way to it). 

I considered stopping for a snack at this point, but I felt that the object of my quest, my very destiny, the Campus Center, was nearing.  I pressed on.

Oh, crap.

Well, this looked scary.  This is the chipper through which they feed the protesters.

Any extreme statements about missiles, execution of protesters and chemical warfare are made in jest.  The University at Albany isn't actually involved in anything like that, to the extent of my knowledge.

Another disconcerting spot in the tunnel.

It just keeps going...

Finally, some damn street art!

YES!!!!

Finally, the light at the end of the ........ tunnel ... I really didn't see that pun coming.

There is one final obstacle in our quest:

If I could record smells with my iPhone, I still wouldn't.  It would be cruel to do that to you.

This was another smelly area.  This is identical to the back docks of many restaurants I've worked in, especially those that were part of much larger operations similar to UAlbany, such as the Grand Summit Hotel at Mount Snow. The difference between UAlbany and those restaurants is that these areas were not open to the public.  And this one was smellier.

The first glimpse of a finished building.

This is  .... ultimately disappointing.  Hmmph.

And thus concludes our trip through the main campus of the University at Albany.  It was quite the shock to me when I first learned that this was the preferred route through campus throughout the majority of the academic year.  The outside of the campus itself is a barren, visually unappealing desert all winter (its appeal is dubious at best the rest of the time), populated by the occasional evergreen tree in one of the planters, whose primary inhabitant is squirrels and crows. (I will admit that the squirrels do brighten up the season.)  Moreover, the design of the campus itself, with large, straight corridors lined by blank walls, creates an amplified effect for the wind, which in Albany is already at an almost unbearable level during the coldest season.

Fortunately, any time I spend on this campus is optional, and I use it mostly to work on assignments, as there is nothing visually appealing to distract me.

Later on, we'll take a walk throughout and home from the downtown campus, which is completely the opposite of this one.  Graceful and stoic, it seeks to reaffirm students that they are in an academic institution worth of their hard work.  It is no wonder, then, that the campus we've just seen is what produced those who destroyed a neighborhood both slowly over many years and all at once on St. Patrick's Day last year.

In the end, it comes down to this:  Albany is too cold for this crap, and students deserve better no matter where they are.