Uris: A Monumental Offense

David Garrard Lowe, writing on Columbia's campus for the Fall 1997 City Journal, found little to love among the university's postwar additions. He was, unsparingly ferocious in his criticisms. The Law School, he wrote, "is on so brutal a scale that its vast balcony seems created for a yet-unborn tyrant and makes [the] sculpture in front of it look like Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin rolled into one and exploded," while Carman "has all the attributes of a high-rise housing project slated for demolition." He saved his most remorseless critism, however, for what is perhaps the worst infraction committed in the architectural history of this university, including multiple-personality- disorder-plagued Lerner. Uris Hall, he wrote, "is a characterless Brobdingnagian structure whose facade, with all the allure of a crematorium, bespeaks a place where people come not to begin their life's adventure, but to end it."
It might seem trite to grouse about architecture, but the mere appearance of a campus can have a significant effect on prospective students or faculty members, who may opt for institutions which chose not to dump what looks like a smashed air-conditioner unit in the midst of their historic grounds. In this light, it defies belief that such a monstrosity as Uris Hall has been permitted to desecrate Columbia's otherwise elegant landscape for over four decades now. With its flanks and crude rooftop looming arrogantly overwhelming Low's graceful dome, its ballooning rear end projecting twice the length of an Avery or Fayerweather, this behemoth, more than any other architectural excretion endured by this university, mocks the spirit of Charles McKim's classroom buildings. Its bombastic hauteur would be seen as tasteless were its Orwellian overtones not so frightening.
Indeed, architectural trends come and go, but Uris has been consistently unloved from its conception. Incensed students picketed its groundbreaking, and an architecture professor's radio interview concerning the structure was confiscated by campus security, unaired. To add insult to injury, Uris was, in the 1980s, retrofitted with the addition of a bizarrely incongruent facade which de-legitimated whatever tenuous connection it may have once had to the monumental axis of columned buildings stretching from Butler to Schapiro. The building became, after this fiasco, beyond any justification, theoretical or otherwise. It is time that its aesthetic reign of terror be put to a swift and decisive end- it should be demolished with all the violence it has committed upon its surroundings since its ill-advised creation.
Not that a wide, gaping hole should be left in place of Uris, but campus should be justly purged of this monstrosity, leaving a vast swathe of campus available for more humane redevelopment. Columbia has been flirting with many famed architectural superstars lately- including Raphael Moneo and Renzo Piano, who will be designing the new northwest corner science building and the Manhattanville campus.
The Business School, naturally, could be relocated to Manhattanville; it would be easier to find for Wall Street executives when it actually possesses a street entrance, and would of course provide them with copious material for tales of adventure with which to regale their co-workers during limo rides back downtown. In the meantime, perhaps, Uris' replacement could be given over to those in most need of space. I personally propose donating an entire wing to Professor Graciela Chichilnisky, who was expelled overnight from her office in Mathematics at the whim of Columbia's epic bureaucracy. In any event, the Morningside campus would be exised of its most repungnant eyesore with students left only to suffer the almost equally repulsive Mudd, which ought to be the next target on the list.