Dennis, Clark & Associates/TAMS
University Center, preliminary design
perspective rendering (1988)
Architect Michael Dennis is the author of Court and Garden: From the French Hôtel to the City of Modern Architecture (1986) in which he explored the potential lessons of historic French hotels for contemporary urbanism and asserted that the "city of contiguous solids is [well-]served by the principles of the Baroque hotel type." Dennis utilized some of these lessons in his competition-winning design for the University Art Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1983, unbuilt), and subsequently adapted that design for Carnegie Mellon's University Center.
Dennis' "city of contiguous solids" is the traditional city of streets and squares and urban facades, the city of Paris and of Hornbostel and of Krier. The French hotels in question feature continuous facades that make definitive margins in the public realm, and screen internal courtyards, making semi-public rooms out of outdoor spaces. The University Center's monumental colonnade delineates the eastern margin of the cut and shapes it as a public space. The south facade defines the east-west pedestrian axis and the related outdoor space of the tennis courts (as rebuilt at virtually their original site). This facade is broken only by a partially screened courtyard, which, with its surrounding linear volumes, is modeled after a similar configuration at the Hôtel de la Vrillière (1635-).
The freedom of plan at the Hôtel de Beauvais (1652-1655) shows what Dennis calls a "hierarchy of locally symmetrical figures," connected by asymmetrical secondary and tertiary spaces. Overall, this plan utilizes a "principle of discontinuity to demonstrate that independence and identity of the part can be achieved without sacrificing the unity of the whole." The floor plans of the University Center reflect these principles, though some of their most asymmetrical and discontinuous aspects were ironed out during design development. The plans accommodate an array of social, recreational, commercial, and institutional functions deployed in a series of pavilions. The rotunda-form commons, pool, gymnasium, ballroom and auditorium, loggia wing, and courtyard have their own distinct functions and volumes. Each is a "locally symmetrical figure" joined one to another by secondary and tertiary spaces.
The difficult dichotomy of the "unity of the whole" and the "independence and identity of the part" is apparent on the exterior as well. The building's materials (yellow brick, concrete, and metal), forms, and careful detailing are sympathetic to the Hornbostel campus. The exterior styling specifically evokes the rational but expressive eighteenth-century neoclassicism of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. Yet with each shift in volume comes changes in elevation and detail. The colonnade has its own overscaled order. Unity is stretched thin around many of the building's numerous corners.
The University Center is itself an urban microcosm. It has three major pedestrian streets (the loggia and the principal hallways), a public square (the commons and courtyard), and urban facades both inside and out. Even so, the University Center is only a part of a larger whole. Only when the corresponding colonnade of the Purnell Center for the Arts is built along the west side of the cut will this outdoor room be shaped as envisioned, and wholly transformed into an urban space. Only then will the "city of contiguous solids" take full shape, and only then will the public intentions of the University Center be made whole.