Our godawful building - aren't we lucky?

Eve brought up some bad memories when she mentioned the Frank Gehry building built at my college/grad school. It is hideous, and I hate it. It seems as if the architect was thinking: "Hm. What would happen if a building could actually become ill and throw up? Eureka! A building would vomit metal out of its roof! Thats it!" Not sure what I mean? Check out the pictures here. I thought it was just ugly, but I didn't know it was also dangerous in the winter. Although I did always wonder why those barricades were there. I actually thought it was related to another issue this building has had: a disgruntled ex-student gunman. Boy, was that an exciting weekend to be on campus!

One thing that I liked a lot about Duke is the fact that there is some sort of unifying architectural style on the campus. CWRU was all over the place - partly because it is actually a fusion of two colleges, and partly because they just didn't care when they put up new buildings. We've got this building (the control tower at a very feminine alien airport) next to this building. And right down the quad is this building (which, to be fair, I think they've torn down, although its still on the campus map) next to this building. We did have one pretty part of campus, the Mather Quad, which has buildings like this and this. But, god forbid we keep the pretty part of campus unscathed, because the barfing metal building is RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET from Mather Quad.

I'm not sure if I'd hate the barfing metal building as much if it were in another location, preferably one where you could step back from it a bit. Where it is, it is literally right on the street - only the sidewalk seperates the building and the street - and then there are buildings right on the other side of the street too. You can't get any sort of perspective on the barfing metal building because you can't get far enough away from it to try to take it in.