Photo courtesy of Nora/Francis Williams
Ah, fall. The leaves are starting to redden in the dying sunlight. The weather is doing its best approximation of a noncommittal shrug, sometimes freezing, sometimes broiling, occasionally pleasant. The first years still don’t know where Common Hour is held, but they’ve hopefully figured out their class schedules by now. And above it all, at the very north end of campus, the Samuel N. and Dena M. Lombardo Welcome Center looms like a beast from the deepest, iciest pits of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Yes, that building whose construction majorly impacted counseling appointments at the Wellness Center last fall is now complete – for a given value of “complete,” that is. The massive ampersand, artfully carved into the design of a facade which otherwise screams, “drunk business major attempts modern art,” cannot be seen at all most of the time due to the monochrome, graphic-design-is-my-passion blue that colors the entire structure. Though of course, this difficulty in discerning detail could also be due to the building’s unfortunate tendency to glow at night. Was that not mentioned before? Sorry, yes, on top of everything else gone so piteously sideways with this design, the monstrosity of a building has the gall to glow at night, antagonizing insomniac Roschelians and nocturnal flyers everywhere.
( That’s not even getting into the much more serious issue of light pollution on F&M’s campus; the street lamps we utilize are the worst of their kind in terms of producing unnecessary light which affects both human sleep hygiene and animal behavior.)
Like the tragic migration of the Writing Center from the vaulted ceiling of Diagnothian to the cold fluorescents of Harris, perhaps all of our campus spaces are simply doomed to suffer migraine-inducing corporate facelifts.
On top of all this, this new, entirely superfluous Welcome Center has forced the original, far superior admissions office to shutter its windows. Remember that cute little brick building you started your campus tour at, back when you were first applying to F&M? Remember how pleasant you found it, with the trees in the courtyard and the tables with their wooden rocking chairs? Well that space is going to be used for…something else now, because the admissions office – including the start of tour guides’ routes – is all being transferred to the Lombardo Center. This new building, may I remind you, sits as far away as possible from anything worth seeing on campus, not even getting into the fact that it can take minutes on end for the traffic light at Harrisburg Avenue to change. Our incredible team of tour guides, precisely trained for their essential job of getting new people to come here, have had to retool their entire tour route, starting across the street from campus at the ugliest display of disposable income a college could ask for.
Riddle me this, dear reader: if you found yourself in possession of a cool $5 million dollars and for some reason decided to spend it on this place, what would you do? Pay to fix the rampant mold problems in the Roschel and West James apartments? Hire a new professor in literally any humanities position? Pay student workers even the few dollars more we were promised so many months ago? Make Brooks habitable? With all these possibilities and more right in front of them, just begging to be fixed, Samuel N. and Dena M. Lombardo instead requested that an already-functional building be reconfigured into a glorified advertising office (which F&M did not need, again we already had an admissions office/Welcome Center), and then got their names put on a nice big sign out front. Science fiction novelist and literary critic Ursula K. Le Guin certainly did not have this welcome center in mind when she said, “the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art,” but I’m sure she would agree that such selfish displays of personal wealth are, at the end of the day, rather artless.
Junior Nora/Francis Williams is a contributing writer. Their email is nwillia1@fandm.edu.