There has been a recent desire at Northwestern to eradicate what the school is on an architectural level: a hot-spot of some of the most interesting Brutalist design in the Midwest. Buildings such as Norris University Center, Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, Donald P. Jacobs Center (Old Kellogg), Regenstein Hall of Music and, most famously, Northwestern University Library, are some of the best known examples of Northwestern’s Brutalism. The most recent attempt to erase what many consider to be a failed architectural movement are the plans to demolish Norris and replace it with the so-called New University Commons, a project currently in funding stasis. The New University Commons is only the newest development in NU trying to turn its campus of concrete into one of glass. This movement is dishonest and has an aura of elitism, a separation from the context and reality in which NU is situated.

Last year, my friends and I wandered campus with the ultimate goal of reaching the Lakefill. However, upon reaching the intersection between the Block Museum and Pick-Staiger, we stopped in awe of Pick-Staiger in particular and the warm light emanating from inside. We admired the sense of naturalness it seemed to possess — with its comfortable tungsten lights glowing on a night coated in freezing mist — and the plants that seemed to naturally cradle the building. This stood in opposition to how utterly false and coincidental the Block felt: as if it was dropped down from the sky, able to exist anywhere because no context could possibly be derived from it. We were put off by the building’s implication that we had arrived in the ultimate intellectual future.

There is a hollow dishonesty in the glass edifices that currently make up a large portion of campus. They seem to scream out to us, “Here we are: the future! Aren’t you satisfied? Humankind has finally achieved the ability to create marvels effortlessly, constructed all from glass and shiny surfaces and particleboard!” But this is a lie. How can we possibly tell ourselves in our present, one diseased with crushing societal dread and collective ills, that, “yes, we have arrived.” What disgusting complacency we have reached if we can look on at our glass monuments and tell ourselves that we are, “living in the future,” that no more improvement is necessary.

Yet, just as people did in the late ’70s and early ’80s with Brutalist architecture, people will soon turn to our Block Museums and our Seeley G. Mudd Libraries and Kellogg Global Hubs and simply say, “Huh — that’s ugly.” As they did with Brutalism, people will begin to develop a realization that these glass buildings are signifiers of a desirable future gone unfulfilled, just as the promises of an ideal future implied by Brutalism both in the East and West went unfulfilled as the West devolved into Reagan-era capitalist excess and the East devolved into despot-communism squalor.

These glass buildings further represent a culture built into Evanston as a whole, this big want of NU’s students and academics to create a wall of separation between themselves and the actual citizens living here. To further emphasize this divide between the University’s community and Evanston citizens, NU has created this false campus, separate from its environment, built at least in part to imply that both it and the people residing and working within it are better than the surrounding town. It does not exist as something part of the environment; it is noticeably apart from it. It gives off an ever-present disassociation that implies that while you are within it, you are not part of the world as a whole.

So, rather than build new monuments to future disappointment and separation from the world, I propose an attempt by NU to embrace and re-contextualize its Brutalist past. Rather than viewing these buildings as ugly and oppressive and cold, we should view them as something of substance, permanence, warmth. They exist as a constant reminder of the now as well as the future: They are something planted here in the present, yet they also possess a permanence that suggests they will be here long after we’re gone. It’s easy to say that this re-contextualization is impossible, but it would be short-sighted to forget that Brutalism has already gone through a change of cultural context: as a once-optimistic symbol of the future to something representative of oppression and decay. It’s time to reclaim Brutalism once again in the face of its modern rejection.

Clay Mills is a Communication junior. He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.