A Plan Elevated
All buildings are the outcome of particular circumstances and multiple inspirations, and in the case of the new Environmental Design Building, the philosophies and practices of architects Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn resonated with many on the design team. Esherick in particular attributed his rigorous approach to Louis Kahn’s idea of how a building might “become what it wanted to be,” but the influence of Le Corbusier is more visibly evident.
This influence came from multiple directions. Much of Donald Olsen’s work emulated that of Le Corbusier, and Donald Reay, who was then partner to DeMars, had worked as a young man in Le Corbusier’s atelier. Indeed, early perspective drawings attributed to Olsen and Reay are clearly reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s work. Wurster too encouraged the design team to embody a “Corbu feeling” in the building, a sense of intentional imperfection and openness that he had witnessed when he visited Le Corbusier’s buildings at Chandigarh, India during a sabbatical year of international travel in 1957.
One of Bauer Wurster Hall’s most memorable features, its proliferation of sunshades—592 in total—also owe some debt to Le Corbusier’s devotion to the brise-soliel (sun break) in his later buildings such as the Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles, France (1952) and those at Chandigarh. Yet the building’s attention to shading was also a way to advance the goal of timelessness. As Esherick put it, the design team tried to avoid designing overly specialized environments because they knew attitudes and ideas would change. Instead, they aimed to deal with just “basic facts such as sun and wind.”
The building’s iconic tower was one of the few elements that the architects allowed themselves to be a little more playful with. The design of the tower underwent many variations, but always part of the design was a large seminar room and balcony at the top of the tower (now called Room 1000) because some of the advising faculty believed designers and planners should have a bird’s eye view of their environment. The interpretation of this tower top as a dragon’s head came early on. It appears dressed up this way in architectural publications soon after the building’s completion.
In the fall of 1960, the architects finally came to a schematic design acceptable to everyone involved. Younger members of the design team drew a series of presentation drawings, which were formally presented to Regents. The university administration accepted the proposed design, although later Donald McLaughlin, a Regent who had worked with Wurster in the planning process, suggested that the administration might not have consented had the building not been “disguised” with trees in the drawings.
