Within Reason

We took one trip to Oxford with the big group in the last few weeks. I also briefly visited Cambridge when my folks were here. The students were excited about the multitude of Harry Potter-iffic sites at Oxford. But I’m sure we were all struck by the the architecture most of all. The same goes for Cambridge, though we didn’t see much of Cambridge. The weather was apparently busy punishing the town for some kind of grievous sin. It all got me thinking about the role of aesthetics in education.

I’ve been thinking much more lately about the role that aesthetics plays in civic life, education, and culture thanks to a wonderful talk by Howard Kunstler in the TED talks series. What’s below certainly fits in to what Kunstler has to say about building spaces that are worthy of the people who live in them.

Surely there is plenty of evidence that people can learn amazing things without any fancy buildings around. But strolling through Oxford or Cambridge, especially the college campuses, causes an undeniable feeling that I can only really attribute to the gravitas of the places. It’s a feeling that’s there to some degree whenever one encounters a college campus. But coupled with the ornate weathered stone facades in a place like King’s College Cambridge (pictured above), the feeling is no less than an encounter with the grand legacy of humans seeking knowledge.

Laying eyes on Trinity College in Cambridge from afar, you can’t help but think Isaac-flippin’-Newton thought there. For all relevant purposes, physics started there. Space travel started there. I’m sure that such thoughts quickly disappear into the background the longer one spends in such a place, but the architecture is always there to remind, to connect us to that past when our thoughts fade. And that’s because the architecture is there because great things were started there. It’s one thing to build monuments. It’s another to build monumental living spaces or monumental learning spaces.

As the architecture ages and becomes weathered, it becomes that constant unconscious sense of continuity with these past events that jars you out of everyday distractions and back on to the path. And it saddens me that many US universities, for all sorts of budgetary reasons, build stylish, semi-usable, disposable buildings that are easily swept away when more space is needed. I wonder how many students, how many discoveries we have lost because we couldn’t be bothered to build spaces that remind people of the tremendous things we humans are capable of. Architecture and education have a mutually reinforcing relationship.