According to this article in The California Tech, Caltech's North House are at "risk of being declared historical buildings." That would then prevent the Institute from tearing them down and starting from scratch.
While I have tons of great memories of Lloyd House and have severe misgivings about tearing down the North Houses and rebuilding them from scratch (this is for nostalgic reasons; my emotions are kind of clouding my rational thinking on this one), I think the idea that they are "historical buildings" is absolutely preposterous. Can anything from that decade be reasonably be declared a historical building? How about that sand castle that I built on on a beach in Malibu when I was 8 or so? Is that also a historical building?
Sheesh.
2 days ago
4 comments:
I agree, this is silly. I could see buildings from the 60's being declared historical if some significant event happened there but I don't think the North Houses qualify. They don't even have the architectural elegance of the South Houses. I enjoyed my time in Lloyd but have no particular attachment to the building itself: I say tear it down.
We had the same issue with LeConte Hall, the physics building at Berkeley--the decision was made to renovate and seismically retrofit at greater expense than just tearing down and rebuilding, since it was expected that any proposal to do the latter would trigger it being declared a historic building. This makes a little more sense for LeConte since it dates back to the 20s or 30s, and has the "cyclotron room" where the first cyclotron was built and operated.
I guess maybe that whole "Lloyd grade" LSD thing might be considered significant enough to warrant the building being declared historical. But Page House should definitely be torn down! ;)
(Now that I've incited the Pageboys who read this to make a snarky comment, I see that my job is done here...)
Snark snark.
I'll be back on campus in two weeks for the alumni game (baseball). Certainly I have wonderful (and not-wonderful) memories of Page (and, to a lesser extent, Lloyd and Ruddock) I agree that the buildings themselves are outdated eyesores which don't AT ALL match the architecture of the east side of campus (South Houses, Athenaeum, etc). Tear 'em down.
DON'T touch the tunnels, though. There's far too much history and wisdom written/drawn/painted on those walls.
I definitely hope that they don't touch the tunnels. One of my regrets is not having explored them very thoroughly. I went down there a few times, but I didn't explore them as thoroughly as I'd like. Maybe I'll still do that a bit more when I visit.
They did get rid of hyperspace when they renovated the South Houses. It's unfortunate, but I also understand why they did it (severe fire hazard).
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