Campus-under-a-tent is different, but. . .
GIANT BUBBLE of yellow-and-whitestriped polyvinly houses a new Antioch College campus in
Maryland. It is intended to allow more flexibility, conserve energy, and save money. Students helped
inflate the tent.
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By WOLF VON ECKARDT
(O 1973. The Washington Post
WASHINGTON—To enter
Antioch’s “pneumatic campus”
at Columbia. Md.’s new town is
like crawling into the belly of a
stranded whale. And the thing. I
am afraid, has as much of a
future
The giant bubble w'hich the
students of the Antioch College
branch at Columbia have blown
up for themselves—with the help
of the U.S. Office of Education,
the Ford Foundation’s
Educational Facilities
Laboratory, several air structure
engineers, and the Goodyear Tire
and Rubber Co—is. to be sure, an
impressive structure.
It covers 180 feet square of a
pleasant, rolling meadow with a
whi te-a nd-yellow striped
polyvinyl skin that bulges up to 25
feet because two small electric
fans keep the air pressure a little
higher inside than out. On the
outside the structure looks like an
enormous air pillow.
The technical problem with air
structures is not to hold them up.
but to keep them down and to
prevent the imperceptibly
pressurized air from escaping.
The antioch bubble is kept down
by an all-around earth beam,
reinforced by logs, as well as foyr
anchor cables inside. To save the
precious pressurized air. people
must enter through a narrow,
somewhat awkward entrance
chamber — the jaw of the whale.
The skin is translucent, so the
Analysis
inside of the belly is light enough
for grass to grow But the light
and the atmosphere inside the
plastic enclosure are eerie and a
bit oppressive. Hie space is
- vaguely landscaped with brick
walks and furnished,
haphazardly as yet, with scaf
folding and sundry small
structures like ski huts and
geodesic mini-domes in search of
a purpose
It is all fearfully vague. What
we have here is just an enclosure
that does not know what to en
close. And that should be a lesson
to our eager Futopian
•echnocrats like Bucky Fuller,
Paolo Soleri, the Archigram
group and all the rest. _
The medium may be the
message these days, but an en
closure. a structural shell, is not
architecture. A shell, dome,
bubble, arcbology or other
structure, no matter how
“mega.” does not a city or even a
campus make. No matter how
ingenious and impressive the
technical solution, it does not
salve any human problems.
, An Antioch student, con
tempiating his rubber “campus,
put it very well, when he said the
other day: “We don’t meet
people’s needs here. We ask
people to adapt to the structure,
which is just the opposite of what
it was supposed to be.”
Yet. a good many idealistic
people, particularly young ar
chitects. continue to be intrigued
with utopian visions of a future
city all under one megastructure
roof It is a reaction to the urban
disintegration we see today
which was largely ordained by
“modern” architects, led by
Lecorbusier, 40 years ago.
Segmented living
Meeting in Athens in 1933, this
avant-garde group, known as
Cl AM or Congress International
D’Architecture Mod erne, decided
that the industrial revolution and
its specialization and diver
sification of social life also called
for a segregation of the various
human activities—working,
living, entertainment, education
and so forth. CIAM’s Athens
charter on city planning led to
building commercial centers
here and cultural centers there,
housing young families in one
place and their elderly parents in
another
It has become clear that, to
avoid the current, galloping
disintegration of our urban
enivomment and our society, we
have to reintegrate our habitat
and reunite the different ac
tivities and social groups. But the
Futopians go to the other ex
treme in a very simplistic way.
Bucky Fuller would put a whole
city under one geodesic dome.
Soleri would stack a whole city
into one mile-high, Babylonian
super-structure out in the desert.
The British Archigram group has
designed fantastic “urban
containers” that somehow are to
bring us together again.
Architecture books and
classrooms are full of these
notions, so you can’t blame
Antioch for wanting “to get with
it.” If the city of the future is to be
all under one catching tent, it
certainly seemed logical to build
one for an entire campus. The
catch-all was to foster a new,
more flexible education, con
serve energy and the en
vironment and save money to
But it doesn’t. The big tent just
cavers continued confusion on
these matters. If you know how
you want to educate young
people, you can. perhaps, do it in
a big container But the container
itself does not provide an
educational content. It is that
medium-message thing. If you
don’t have a message, it might
make you feel better to get high
on the medium. But Antioch, it
seems, did not stay high on its
bubble very long. Now that it is
built, the college does not seem to
know just what to do with it.
Not does the megastructure
save energy in itself. It still must
be lit at night and it certainly
must be air-conditioned during
the day, which is not necessary in
a conventional structure
designed to catch the breeze. One
irony of the Antioch bubble was
that it got so hot during the recent
international conference on air
structures, called to celebrate its
completion, that the meetings
had to be held in a nearby motel.
Deceiving Saving
It seems doubtful, too, that the
megastructure saves money in
the end. By the time it is air
conditioned and heated, sun
divided and arranged for func
tional activites, as well as
suitably furnished, it will
probably cost just as much as an
equivalent conventional cluster
of structures. It is, at any rate,
not fair for the bubble enthusiasts
to claim that their construction
cost was only $5.50 a square foot
compared to the $20 to $40 a
square foot most conventional
college building cost. The $5.50
pays only for the container,
which is no more than the body of
an automobile without the motor,
wheels, seats, springs and all the
other things to make it run and
transport people.
Enter the next fallacious
rationalization of the urban and
campus bubble builders: we
don’t want to freeze urban life or
college education into any rigid
pattern they say. In keeping with
British architect Ron Herron and
the Archigram group’s dream of
a “walking city,” the Antioch
structure is conceived as “a
nomadic campus.” It was
designed so it can easily be
aetiaiea ana pumpeu up else
where in Columbia or across the
country, if the need arose.”
What need ?Unlimited
flexibility and mobility, the
avant-garde cry for “disposable
architecture.” are not, I would
hold, the response to a need, but
the expression of an anxiety. The
human need is for order, per
manence and tranquility in an
age of cataclysmic change that
seems to have gone out of control.
This is not to say that the Office
of Education, the Educational
Facilities Laboratory, and the
Antioch students wasted their
time and their money. The An
tioch bubble has unquestionably
advanced the art of building air
structures. And there is a place
for unstructured structures if
they are designed for purposes
that structure themselves.
One such purpose is temporary
exhibits The U S. pavilions at the
1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, an air
structure, and at the 1967 Expo at
Montreal, a geodesic dome, were
exciting successes. They frankly
had a temporary function.
Another purpose that struc
tures itself is sports and games.
Milligan College in Johnson City,
Tenn. began last year to build the
largest permanent air structure
in the country to shelter a field
house with a pool and two
basketball courts. Similar field
houses and student centers are in
various stages of planning and
construction at La Verne College
in California, the University of
Santa Clara in California, the
University erf Minnesota, South
Dakota State University, Florida
Junior College, and the Charles
Wright Academy in Tacoma,
Wash. They all meet specific,
useful purposes.
The best practical purpose of
the Antioch bubble, however,
may well be to help deflate the
all-purpose and no-purpose
megastructure idea. It is easy to
get a structural high. But it
seems awfully hard to get
campus and city planning down
to earth where the people are.
M
PUT THE UFE
IT OUT OF YOUR MATCHES
BEFORE THEY PUT THE LIFE
j OUT OF YOUR FORESTS.