What a university should be.

It’s academic week here! After the sheer architectural awfulness of UCSF Mission Bay profiled earlier, take a look at Stanford in Palo Alto, CA.

The apocryphal story has it that Leland Stanford, his fortune in nineteenth century US rail secure, offered a large chunk of it to Harvard as an endowment. When this scruffy looking Californian was refused so much as an audience with the Dean he left in a huff and gave the dough to create Stanford in Palo Alto instead. His creation has become one of the very greatest schools in America, rivaling Harvard for academic excellence. (As an alumnus of the School of Engineering at University College, London, I have no axe to grind, and hereby proffer humble apologies to the many Harvard alumni reading this, just in case. I will be quite happy were our son to attend either of these great American schools – or both!) Today an engineering degree from Stanford is as certain a guarantee of fame and fortune in Silicon Valley as there is.

The architecture and environment could scarcely differ more from the horrors of UCSF. Just look:

Now which would you or your child rather attend?

All snaps on an Olympus C5050 and a Panasonic G1 with the 9-18mm Olympus MFT lens.

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.