Charles Luckman Associates
Administration Building [Warner Hall]
perspective rendering (1966)
Donner Hall [is] a distinctive, distinguished building--imaginative in conception, outstanding in technical performance, carried through with taut and sensitive controls of planning, proportioning, and detailing...The architects have chosen to throw their weight toward as new a beginning architecturally as is possible at the moment. (McKee 1955)
Donner and the campus buildings that followed constituted a major building boom; but they were sited and designed with little or no reference to their context or each other, and no allegiance to any overall concept. They soon fell into disfavor.
Sadly, subsequent architects [did not maintain] Hornbostel's standards or his idealism, and in the 1960s, the University's second sustained building campaign produced an architectural nightmare. The decade began with the construction of the hapless Skibo Hall (1960), a building in search of an axis, followed by Hunt Library (1961), a building in search of an entrance, and Scaife Hall (1962) with its sculptural lecture hall squeezed into an alley like a blister in an ill-fitting shoe. Warner Hall (1966), which brings to the campus all of the dignity and character of a speculative office building in Monroeville, concluded the boom. (Cleary 1985)
Skibo, Hunt Library, and Warner Hall occupy what could be considered the three most prominent sites on the Carnegie Mellon campus. Skibo and Warner Hall flank the "cut" at the end that meets Forbes Avenue. Any structure that is given such importance should be a strong anchoring element that helps to define the edges of the green space...Neither building is a strong presence nor do they help to define the cut as open space. Hunt Library, which sits opposite Forbes Avenue at the termination of the cut, is also a weak element... (Keating 1986)