Montclair State College - La Campana Yearbook (Upper Montclair, NJ)

Page 25 text:

i, The creative idea, that indefineable force which compels man to act, takes form through the mind of man. What causes man to respond to these psychic influences and why the shapes or forms which evolve? One can look back on an age or an era and intellectually conceptualize the motivation responsible for the observed form. However, the experience within the psyche of the observer focuses the mind in directions not yet perceived by the psyche involved in the past era ' s forms. The total collection of the cidtural environment and the experience of the creative psyche, mold the form which appears. Once that form evolves, it proceeds to influence in some way, all forms which follow. If, in the attempt to recreate the experience, man

Page 24 text:

mi iSM Atrocity looks curiously distorted through the eye of time- But there it reinains - a twisted monument of what was, that can bind us blind to a yesterday. Forget it? Store it in the back pages of the soul? It cannot be done, for the warped remains so in concrete terms. Yet something within us reaches beyond a broken and ugly defeat- into some sort of victory- for a tree grows back, a hundredfold, if given the chance.

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comes close to capturing the essence of a past design in form, the experience of recapturing is a totally different experience from the initial creative process. The observer of today may interpret the visual effect of College Hall as an attrocity , yet would the planners of the early part of the century have considered this view as inevitable? With grand dreams of Montclair as the progenitor of the State ' s secondary educators, the ' institution found itself in the romantic setting of Spanish-type buildings, strangely representative of California, with transplanted pines for landscape. In what is an essentially romantic spirit, the desire to escape, our predecessors create a massive administration-classroom building with a red-tile