NKU Groundbreaking

One of the things I like about doing articles for the paper is that I get to speak and learn about different people and things. I get to dabble in other people's interests and personalities.

Take this example. It's the story about the groundbreaking of a new student center at Northern Kentucky University. I politely asked if the new student center will be as ...well...um...ahh.... as ugly as the rest of the buildings on campus.

I then learned a new word. Actually, a new architectural style - Brutalism. Here's the wikipedia link. The whole NKU campus is brutalist. Big concrete blocks piled on top of one another. Impossible to know where the doors are. It's not organic. You go around a corner and you're disoriented. Giant angular shadows thrown everywhere and everything feels cold. It's like living on the set of a 1970s Charleton Heston movie. Representative pics are here (with Cincy in the background), here, and here.

There's a building downtown that I think is a Brutalist. It's here. It's hard to tell from the photo, but it's cut off from the rest of downtown (see it here in this 1980 photo) by a major highway, but it sits right on the river. Here's the view I get of this behemoth driving home from work.

Just plain ugly. Oh, well, here's an artist rendering of the new Student Union that I wrote about. Thankfully not so Brutalist. But still.....

Stay You.
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