An architectural nightmare.

The architecture of a university campus seems to bear little relationship to its academic excellence. The raft of Nobel laureates in physiology and medicine at UCSF Mission Bay in south east San Francisco would appear to confirm that a welcoming environment and academic excellence are unrelated. Visit this soulless campus and you would swear that, even at lunch hour, the place has been hit by a neutron bomb. The public areas, such as they are, will be empty, the buildings remain standing. The ‘quad’, if you can call it that, is dominated by two fifty foot slabs of steel plate covered with graffiti and rust …. see the third snap below.

And it’s not as if the near constant construction at this huge campus is improving things. Whereas you can see some hint of originality in the brutality of London’s Barbican or the sheer silliness of Paris’s Pompideau Museum, their is neither wit, whimsy or originality in the structural steel passing for architecture at UCSF Mission Bay.

UCSF, Mission Bay.

Try as I may to inject some wit and interest into snaps of this architecturally arid desert, I fear I am doomed to fail. I don’t see myself revisiting this area any time soon unless, that is, I get a sudden hankering for a Nobel Prize in physiology, which is a long shot.

What were they thinking of here?

The reflections say more than this building ever will.

Slabs of rusty steel ….

Little sign of life.

A rare human being.

No, I am not making this up.

“Ugh!”, in a word.

How desperate a place is this to take your child?

This one must be the campus gaol.

Deserted. As usual.

All snapped over the past two years on the Panny G1 with the kit and 45-200mm MFT lenses.