>This brought to mind a story--I would guess apocryphal, but it *could* be
>true--that I was told some years back:
>
>When San Francisco State University was being planned, Frank Lloyd Wright
>thought that the site was interesting, and offered to design the whole
>campus for free.
Doug's story about SFS reminded me of another architecture story that
perhaps illustrates Yrjo's point about acknowledging historical forces.
During the urban renewal days of Richard Daley's Chicago, the city built a
new university, the University of Illinois-Chicago. To create the site
they needed to raze a number of old Italian neighborhoods--this was
accomplished by buying out property and homes from people who were deeply
rooted in the community but who were given no options about staying. I
moved to Chicago in the late 1970's and the wounds of displacement were
still very open and painful. The emotional trauma of these families'
removal still haunted the campus then, and perhaps still does. While not
strictly an architectural consideration, this historical consideration
surely affects the ways in which people use this space.
Peter