Madison, Wisconsin

We got into Madison and dropped Courtney off at the cooperative house where she would be staying at. It was called the Lochlorien Co-op and about 30 people lived there.



We got the tour of the house, which is really more appropriately described as a castle. It was apparently built by an old professor in the beginning, and then over the years it was a frat house, a military barracks, etc before becoming acquired by the co-op network of madison. There are about 20 co-op houses in Madison under this one network. One of them is called the Emma Goldman House. It was really cool because the house was right on the shore of Lake Mendota (I think) and there was a great view.



Stirling and I went to go look for a hotel but driving in Madison was kind of a nightmare and we didn't really know where we were going. We ended up crunched for time before the screening which was set to start at 7:30, so instead we ended up parking by the campus and decided to find a hotel after the screening.

Stirling had agreed that he was going to introduce us that night. His introduction was amazing and included the phrase "and so forth," some professorial pacing, and the statement "they started with the essential question... What is public space?".

BRUTALIST ARCHITECTURE RANT
The people who helped set up the documentary screening told us some interesting stories about the architecture of the building where we were doing the screening, the Mosse Humanities Building. On August 24, 1970, Sterling Hall (in which is housed the Army Math Research Center) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was destroyed by a homemade bomb in a Vietnam War protest. A researcher was killed. There was also just a ton of political unrest on campus in general during the 60s and 70s. The people we were with said that they had thought the humanities building was a response to the bombing, but Mosse Humanities was built prior to that, but in the midst of a lot of political unrest in general. If anyone has more information about actual building plans for the humanities building that mention plans to squash protest, I'd be interested to hear about it.



So, when they designed this new humanities building, they designed it with the idea of making it "riotproof" or impossible to be taken over by students. The layout inside is confusing and there are a lot of entrances so that it is more difficult to block an entrance.


If nothing else, it is ugly as sin.

I did a bit of online research and discovered that the architectural style of this building is known as BRUTALISM. The Mosse building was designed by Chicago architect Harry Weese. According to Wikipedia, brutalist architecture is often criticized for the following reasons:

Critics argue that this abstract nature of brutalism makes the style unfriendly and uncommunicative, instead of integrating and protective as its proponents intended. For example, the location of the entrance of a brutalist structure is rarely obvious to the visitor.

Brutalism is also criticised as disregarding the social, historic, and architectural environment of its surroundings, making the introduction of such structures in existing developed areas appear very stark, out of place, and alien.

This is definitely the reaction that the building evoked in me when i saw it. I discovered while browsing online, that the university plans to demolish the building within the next decade. Probably to make room for an architectural style that is less obviously alienating and more subtle. Maybe they'll throw in some new urbanism to blend in with the whole State Street shopping (i.e. consuming identity) experience.

While the doc. played I was able to satiate my longing for Chipotle on Madison's historic state street (i.e. typical oldstyle district now being filled with corporate placelessness).

It rained A LOT while we were in Madison and there were pretty much constant grey skies.

- an example of the beautiful tree-lined streets in the university district

One of the people from the co-op where courtney stayed, Henry, showed us around the old warehouse district after we checked out the Madison infoshop on Saturday. There were lots of old interesting buildings.