University of Denver - Kynewisbok Yearbook (Denver, CO)

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architecture on campus now. how could it fit in?” on-campus housing increased. Johnson-MacFarlanc Hall in the late 1950’s and the Centennial twins in the early 1960’s provided the University with modern housing. For some reason, never fully understood, the University decided to build its housing for married and graduate students a mile from campus near Colorado Boulevard in 1962 to complete the housing situation. Built in 1949-50, the downtown College of Business Administration Building was sold to the city in the late sixties when the college decided to move to the University Park Campus. Joined with the General Classroom Building, the College of Business Administration building forms the core of the campus. In these two buildings we have another pair of structures designed to look alike, but also dissimilar from the rest of the campus. The Boettcher Center, looking unlike any other building on campus, helped shift the orientation of the sciences to the southern part of the campus. Along with the NASA building and Knudson Hall, Boettcher forms the core of science facilities which include several old barracks, a few houses and even a World War I temporary building. There has been a great deal of criticism concerning the aesthetic aspects of the University of Denver campus, much of it justified. Lacking central planning the University appears to have built a building whenever someone gave it money. Only occasionally, as in the case of the Penrose Library, have University needs and money dovetailed. The new library, a gift of the Spencer Penrose Foundation, may signal the opening of a new era in construction on the DU campus. Built cheaply and efficiently in record time, the library departed from many traditional notions of what a college library should be. This drew a great deal of criticism, yet Penrose has become the center of life on the campus. Gyo Obata. the imaginative young architect responsible for Penrose defended the library from the criticism that it didn’t blend in with campus architecture, arguing that “There’s no good architecture on campus now. How could it fit in?” Despite criticism of the library, students have been using it in record numbers, thus indicating that the quality of this facility, like the quality of all other facilities on campus, docs have an impact upon the academic aspects of the Institution.