The first video, “Getting Ready,” shows some of the preliminary site work and underpinning of adjacent buildings that occurred prior to the actual start of foundation work.

These videos are purely educational and informative in nature: after all, in spite of the numerous problems that this building has, some of which I have discussed elsewhere on this blog, it’s construction is actually quite interesting and in many ways unusual.

Given my prior and continuing criticism of the Milstein Hall design, I would like to acknowledge the support for this video project by the College of Architecture, Art & Planning (Dean Kent Kleinman) and the Construction Manager (Welliver McGuire). Of course, there is a contractual stipulation that some form of educational outreach must be provided along with the actual construction of the building — so my video project proposal, having little if any competition from other faculty initiatives, may have been viewed as a necessity to fulfill this contractual obligation. In any case, I appreciate the support I’ve been given. Disclaimer: Any views or opinions expressed on these videos are entirely my own (except where views or opinions are expressed directly by other people appearing in the videos), and are not necessarily the views of Cornell University, OMA, or any of the consultants, subcontractors, or construction managers involved in the construction of Paul Milstein Hall.

With the need for great quantities of prime library space increasingly in doubt, Cornell’s bad decision to demolish Boardman Hall in 1958 — in order to build the much larger Olin graduate library on the Arts Quad — should now be seriously revisited. This is a unique opportunity to begin planning to heal the wound that was inflicted on the Quad, an opportunity that may never present itself again.

Compare Boardman Hall (left images) with Olin Library (right images)

Cornell’s planning and architectural decisions after Word War II have largely been disastrous; in fact, the architectural beauty of the campus is almost entirely due to the pre-WW II infrastructure that remains in place. The Arts Quad, in particular, is one of the greatest such assemblages of buildings in America, and would become absolutely spectacular if its southern edge could once again be defined by Boardman Hall, designed by the same architect, William Henry Miller, who designed Uris Library. Miller was an early graduate of Cornell’s architecture program in the 1870s.

Uris Library seen from the loggia of Boardman Hall

Preserving and enhancing Cornell’s historic buildings and districts has apparently not been a priority. The recent expansion of housing adjacent to the neo-Gothic West Campus dormitories (originally Baker Court, 1916) and beyond Balch Hall in North Campus (1927) has done to these campus quadrants what Olin Library has done to the Arts Quad. It would be a remarkable and unique decision to take advantage of the imminent reduction in library space needs by actually doing something important for the long-term future of the campus.

The former Law Library in Boardman Hall

Boardman Hall and Uris Library viewed from Sheldon Sundial

[this composite image added 7/14/10; photo with Olin Library by J. Ochshorn]

Boardman Hall (left) vs. Olin Library (right)

Part of what didn’t make sense in the planning of Milstein Hall was its connection at the second-floor level to the Fine Arts Library in Sibley Hall. For security reasons, this connection would have been difficult to implement, and it is likely that the doors between Milstein and Sibley Halls would have remained locked and unusable. Cornell would not permit such issues to be considered in the planning for Milstein Hall, so that the decision to link Milstein to the library space always seemed dubious.

2nd-floor plan, Milstein Hall, Cornell University

On March 24, 2010, I was called to the Dean’s office to discuss his plan to move the Fine Arts Library out of Sibley Hall, replacing it with studio space and faculty offices that are now in Rand Hall. The ultimate aim is to house the Fine Arts Library in Rand Hall. This appeared sensible for at least two reasons. First, it resolves the embarrassment of having Milstein Hall unable to connect with Sibley Hall: with design studios in Sibley and Milstein at the second-floor level, there would no longer be a security issue forcing the interconnecting doors to be locked. Second, Rand Hall appears to be a much stronger building than Sibley, which has always had problems actually supporting book stacks (unless they are spread out in an inefficient manner). Rand, on the other hand, could house books quite efficiently. In other words, Sibley has a wooden floor structure appropriate for studios, classrooms, and offices; while Rand has a steel and reinforced concrete floor system appropriate for heavier loads like libraries.

But Cornell, in its wisdom, did not plan for such a move, and will not pay for it. Apparently, the only way to accomplish this is to use money already being spent by the college to rent space on Esty Street (downtown Ithaca). By implementing an elaborate phasing plan — in which Esty St. studios are moved to Rand Hall’s first floor, displacing faculty offices which are moved into the Fine Arts Library space, displacing books which are moved either into more dense stack areas under the dome, or into the library’s annex — it seems possible to take the Esty St. rent and apply it to the limited (and temporary) renovation of Sibley and Rand Hall as described above. Ultimately, fund-raising would need to occur so that the entire Fine Arts Library (or some portion thereof that is not housed in the annex) could be moved to a suitable home in Rand Hall, with faculty offices moved again (this time to the third floor of Sibley Hall), and studios moved from Rand Hall into Sibley’s second floor as well as into the soon-to-be-completed Milstein Hall.

But this plan raises another question about the future of libraries. When I talked to Dean Kleinman in March 2010, I suggested that the general strategy of reclaiming Sibley for studios and offices seemed to make much sense, especially since the Fine Arts Library could never logically connect directly to Milstein Hall from its current location in Sibley Hall. However, I made the point that, given the rapidly fading importance of physical books in academic life, it might be wise to reconsider whether fund-raising for a new library home in Rand Hall was an appropriate use of resources. Increasingly, books and journals are accessed electronically; this trend is clearly accelerating, especially with devices like Kindles and iPads becoming available in recent years. Many academic books and journals are already available online as “electronic resources” through Cornell’s library system.

A recent article in the Cornell Chronicle dated June 29, 2010 confirms that Cornell’s engineering library at Carpenter Hall is being dismantled effective next year, since it was discovered that “approximately 99 percent of the use of the collection consists of online materials.” [UPDATE 8/13/10: two additional libraries at Cornell are being "re-imagined": see Chronicle article here.] In fact, what stands between a fully digitized world of knowledge and the ability to gain access to that knowledge is neither technology nor resources per se, but rather an unholy alliance of forces intent on preserving the infrastructure of what is called intellectual property so that the unfettered diffusion of knowledge can continue to be held hostage to the demands of copyright owners.

Here we see before us a classic instance of the relations of production (including the legal infrastructure defining intellectual property) falling far behind the actual means of production (including the digitization of what were previously physical books and journals). It can already be seen how these relations of production are changing in response to the developing reality of the Internet. See, for example, Google vs. Viacom.

Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art & Planning’s Fine Arts Library is one of the nation’s best. Implicit in Dean Kleinman’s plan to create a new mausoleum for the Fine Arts Library’s physical collection is an attempt to preserve this competitive advantage by renovating new space for the collection. But in an age when physical collections of books will have little utility, except as objects admired in book museums, this appears to be another questionable space-allocation decision and points to the past rather than the future. Instead, Cornell should be working to accelerate the digitization of its (and all other) collections, and to participate in movements aiming for the unfettered distribution of all scholarly works in open-access networks.

image of hole in floor

I made a calculator to help designers figure out whether their proposed holes, connecting two or more floors in a building, are in compliance with the 2009 IBC (similar to earlier versions). I also provide a more detailed discussion of the logic behind making such holes, with an invitation for those more expert than myself to clarify some puzzling code issues.

There are one or two other songs that I wrote in my more distant past (high school, to be precise), but I haven’t decided whether to record them. So this means that any new recordings will be either new compositions, old favorite — unrecorded — Rollo songs written by Dan Smullyan in the 1970s and 1980s, or maybe some new Rollo collaborations.

You can also download or listen to an MP3 version of the song, and view lyrics and technical notes.

At the same time, I just discovered that my recording of Squints was the winner of the 2008 BoardGameGeek.com contest for real songs that reference actual boardgames in their titles or lyrics.