1/27/15 Week 2 Day 1

      Today, starting at Foellinger, we walked up through the Main Quad, Bardeen Quad (the engineering quad) and the North Quad. The view from the bottom of the Main Quad, looking out onto the lines of sidewalk the trees that line the perimeter, all the way to the Union on the opposite side is a fantastic sight even without sunshine.

      The Main Quad has a theme running through most of it, red brick and tall columns,

and an imaginary line runs around the edge of quad, most of buildings' front meeting up with this line, creating the illusion of an enclosed space, a central box of architecture and learning for the campus. Of course there are outliers;

architects want to have a piece of their era in their work. They want the style of the time period in which they lived to show through in their legacies. 

     After taking a look at one of the most locally-famous pieces of architecture on campus, Altgeld,

a building whose halls are about as difficult to navigate as the many urban legends surrounding its history, we headed north to Bardeen Quad.

   The axis of this quad, created for engineering students just above the Main Quad, runs along its side. Walking north along this sidewalk, one sees the sloping hills and Boneyard Creek off to the right as well as a large piece of art at the north end.

The tour of the main axis of campus finished off with the North Quad, a small space dominated by the Beckman Institute at its head. A large structure, its length separates the north side of the city from the campus, a supposedly open center for all to learn.

Despite being small and perhaps not well-enough thought out, the North Quad does hold some amazing artwork, like this piece, a structure whose interior changes color periodically.

The main axis of campus is beautiful way to spend some time exploring. The quads are magnificent and the architecture holds so much history and so many stories. An entire day could be spent wandering up to Beckman and taking in the sights. Even longer could be spent exploring the history of buildings and the land around it.