Higher Ed

Universities and Colleges (and secondary schools) have sponsored some interesting modern buildings.

For example MIT had Eero Saarinen build two.

Kresge Auditorium (1953-55):

Kresge Chapel at MIT:

To mention an obvious tangent for future posts, modernism found some very great exponents in church builders during the 1940s-70s.  Minneapolis / St. Paul has loads of them.

The Beinecke Library (Gordon Bunshaft, 1963) at Yale has a neat CRT television-style stencil across the exterior.

Those CRT patterns also appear in the 1971 University Park Plaza, a pentagonal (!) office building adjacent to the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota.

Dear old Dartmouth had a few nice modernist designs, which of course were destroyed.  The Peter Kiewit Computation Center:

....  as well as Gerry and Bradley Halls, the famous "Shower Towers."  Kiewit was destroyed in 2000.  It was interesting partly because its main public accommodations were one level under grade.  

The Shower Towers:

Now gone.

St. John's University in Collegeville, MN has several amazing modernist assets (including their incredible Marcel Breuer designed Abbey, to be included in a churches post -- perhaps an exclusive Catholic Church post).

Their Peter Engel Science Center, of Marcel Breuer:

And their Alcuin Library:

What an amazing place.  I think St. John's might have the top modernist assets and certainly wins for concentration of modernist sites.

Kosovo's National Library in Pristina deserves a look:

Whew!  That's crazy!

Finally, something pretty well chronicled in architecture books: Louis Kahn's creation at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH.  Kahn designed this library in 1965.