From The Editors

To the Escape Pods!

By AZ

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Image by Rolando Peñate
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Interpretosis, our chosen malady, demands that we examine the violently earnest unfurling of Brown's new capital campaign, Boldly Brown, with absolute dialectical seriousness. In an age where cultural hegemony is at its starry zenith, our advertisements—like all manifestations of aesthetic life—are our self-styled dream texts. Nowhere is the physical presence of the University more closely linked to its intangible fantasies than in its publicity video, featured with technological coquettishness on its website. Piano chords, molto morbidamente, yield to tympanic beats and gunfire and with guillotine-like violence the camera cuts and zooms its way through a campus of infinite particulate: architraves, columns, gables, black gates and belvederes with gold-topped weathervanes. Ruth Simmons is also here, extolling the University's mission: not to "bask in the glow" of knowledge but to produce it, to send it into the world.

To call this vision of Brown utopic is a commonplace. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that the University is perhaps the last place in our age where such a discourse is permitted; where an institution actively posits itself as a total system, a communal enclave of learning and living, with the future benefit of the nation in mind. In a society that no longer dreams utopia—either communist or fascist or primitive—though, the University seems less like the vanguard of a shrinking movement than a profoundly empty gesture. "The transmission of knowledge," at the University, a well-known philosopher tells us, "is no longer designed to train an elite capable of guiding the nation towards its emancipation, but to supply the system with players capable of acceptably fulfilling their roles at the pragmatic posts required by its institutions." What if the trumpet blasts of the Boldly Brown webcast are really the loud and boisterous marching music of a New Orleans funeral?

The Boldly Brown video enunciates a crisis. Its rapid-fire montage, in which Brown is bagatellized into its component parts, has its counterpart in a campus architecture that can best be described as tending towards aestheticism, historicism and, above all, bric-a-bracic irrelevance. The eternal necessity of architecture is its claim to art—architecture as a living force. Distraction is the word Benjamin used, in a positive sense, to describe our relationship to the built environment. He meant that through architecture we gradually learn to live in a new way. At Brown today architecture itself is a distraction, a mirage, another hieroglyphic. It attempts nothing so it never fails.

The short walk from the much-maligned Science Library to the new Life Sciences building is a journey from historical possibility on to the sopping permafrost of nostalgia. We do not object to the Life Sciences building on the grounds that it is intrusive. Buildings should displace, so long as they rearrange. We take issue with its hysterical inoffensiveness. It is a slab of red brick with windows thrown on. It is an edifice with potted trees placed to mitigate its non-existence. The only 'solution' it proffers is a glass bridge, a ludicrous decoration or at best evidence of the unsuitability of its site. Since it claims the past for itself, as well as a sterile scientistic future, it achieves synthesis as a matter of course. Its lack of aesthetic is its ultimate aestheticization: it is a fascistic building for a post-historical age.

The Sciences Library, on the other hand, attempts to solve a problem. Its grey poured concrete edifice, its looming aberrant bigness, may offend, but it achieves a spatial harmony, proportionality, a simplified structural logic. At dusk, when the Science Library casts a shadow, its sculptural mastery of space is evident. We admire it, but we are not nostalgic for the Science Library per se. We only point to it as a style, as an attempt to seek solutions, as grappling (and perhaps failing) to give concrete expression to the life of an epoch or an epoch's ideas. Some of our journalistic colleagues want more of the same kitsch in the proposed Athletic Center. In the words of Walter Gropius, "we have had enough and to spare of the arbitrary reproduction of historic styles." We seek a confrontation with life, not its sublimation into an historical simulacrum. We seek history, not its endless deferment. Instead of boldly renewing the University in bad faith, let us begin again and ask: What is the ideal type of building?

—AZ

As If You Care

When I was 10, I saw Christian Slater's Pump up the Volume, and it blew my young mind. This movie single-handedly shaped my definition of cool, in that it depicts all that I admire: pirate radio stations, dark haired sexually assertive vixens, and moody music. Freshmen year, I was at a party and I was describing a movie that was trapped in my psyche, but whose title I had forgotten. This incoherent movie description somehow led to instant bonding. The girl with whom I was speaking excitedly reminded me that the movie in question was Pump up the Volume, and we instantly made a date to watch it. Now, I am 20 and still dig shy, intelligent guys, who may or may not be just a bit deranged, and I made a great friend.

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