It all started with the Brain.
The ring road surrounding and shaping the campus was no accident. The cerebral, upside down shape stands out in diagrams and models from as early as 1955 as a slight nudge to future students.
Before there were dining halls, before the Science buildings were erected, before even the Couper Administration Building was a twinkle in its creators’ eyes, the 375 acres not yet known as Binghamton University were a blank slate.
The architects who sculpted this campus would go on to design distinguished buildings at Ivy League schools like Princeton and Columbia. But for their work here in Vestal, they were stuck with limited state funding and its architectural correlate: government red brick.
In 1955, when the New York City-based architectural firm Moore & Hutchins put pen to paper to design the campus, there was nothing on the site to draw from.
‘Architects look at what is around them, and then they decide to do counterparts to what they see,’ said Robert A. Hutchins, whose father, the late Robert S. Hutchins, designed most of the buildings on campus.
‘Out in the country, there was nothing to build on,’ said Hutchins, who was also an architect and has worked on educational buildings. ‘The campus should have a sense of unity, and that the function be represented in design.’ As the University was being created from thin air, Hutchins and Moore would have been unable to consult with faculty on their needs.
And so Hutchins and his work partner, John Moore, designed the Brain. And then they kept going.
IVY LEAGUE
Architecturally, Binghamton University’s campus is anything but Ivy. On any dreary, rainy Saturday, the buildings and grounds can look more grim than Georgian, more dreary
than Edwardian.
That vision can linger with alumni long after they graduate, as it did for Eric Spielman ’79, a San Francisco-based architect and former Pipe Dream production manager.
‘I don’t think it was a dynamic campus, but it was functional,’ said Spielman, who remembers the ‘common vocabulary’ of the traditional red brick buildings that still stand today. ‘I don’t know if I would call it bland ‘ but they were very conventional.’
The two men largely responsible for that campus aesthetic, ‘conventional’ or otherwise, were also responsible for architecture at some of the country’s real Ivies.
In 1963, Moore & Hutchins designed the Woolworth Center for Musical Studies at Princeton University, and a year later the firm was responsible for Columbia University’s Uris Hall in its Graduate School of Business Administration.
Dorms at Oberlin College were designed by Hutchins & Moore, and, The New York Times reported, Hutchins was the supervising architect at Vassar College from 1960 to 1985.
The firm worked on several public schools in New York City, as well as renovations for Grace Church on Manhattan’s
East Village.
Moore literally wrote the book on buildings for education, or at least a chapter of it. Binghamton isn’t mentioned in Volume 3 of ‘Forms and Functions of 20th Century Architecture,’ but Moore wrote the section on ‘Colleges
and Universities:’
‘Unless financial conditions dictate otherwise, the tendency at present is toward single rooms,’ he wrote in a passage about dorms, ‘so that each student may study or entertain without interference from a roommate.’
Moore & Hutchins got more work at Binghamton, too, until 1974, designing the Couper Administration Building, Lecture Hall, the Glenn G. Bartle Library, the science buildings, dining halls and the Old University Union.
But despite the architects’ reputation, they could not escape the limitations of materials bought on a public university’s budget.
‘There was a certain continuity with many of the structures ‘ a lot of red brick,’ Spielman, a Pipe Dreamer turned architect, said.
The brick is a common marker, and certainly not an accident, Hutchins said, recalling his father’s work at Binghamton.
‘When you’re involved in a state university, there are important budgetary considerations. The majority [of buildings] are brick, probably because they are less expensive and durable,’ he said.
It wasn’t until the 1970s, Spielman said, that the architecture on campus actually got interesting ‘ and that meant a departure from the red brick.
The Engineering Building, long maligned by students who say it resembles a parking complex, and the College-in-the-Woods dorms, also mythologized as akin to a women’s prison, are memorable to Spielman.
‘I kind of see something interesting, and the architect was trying something different,’ he said of the Engineering Building, a classic example of the concrete-heavy Brutalist architecture movement.
‘It’s a product of its time ‘ that’s just how buildings were built back then.’