Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures

YESTERMORROW PLACE

We have all strolled through colleges and noted that the library is here, the art gallery there, the museum next door, and the classrooms and theater just beyond. Often, we found libraries sharing quarters with certain colleges. But if two or three of the above-mentioned environments happen in one building, they are separated in confines that shut out people rather than invite them in.

Imagine, instead, what I call a Yestermorrow architecture, imaginative enough and large enough to enclose everything in a single structure.

And one, I might add, that lures, calls, leads, and pulls you from one area to the next.

Imagine…

The outer circle, the art galleries, would illustrate all of the metaphors to be found as you move inward.

The second circle would display all the artifacts of our various histories in a museum round.

The third enclosure would be the library.

Followed by the inner round of the classrooms.

And at last, the theater.

Why a theater at our architectural core?

Well, isn’t life one drama topping another? Isn’t everything theater?

Everything, that is, from courting rituals to marriage ceremonies, to office space, to town plaza, to rocket pad at Canaveral?

Try to imagine any human activity that does not finally shape itself into vivid metaphors spoken, acted, taught.

What we have here then is a series of incredible cups, round boxes, a five-shelled wagon train circled to shield us from the night.

Again, stepping through from circle to circle, what would we find?

The paintings, lithographs and watercolors that portray humanity in private encounters or en masse.

Natural life itself as delivered to us by archaeologists and anthropologists from tarpits or Troy ruins.

And then all the massed bricks of the wondrously mysterious library where one can monkey-climb the stacks to Kilimanjaro leopard, Everest snow, or Alpha Centauri immortality.

Giving the onionskin another peel—the university.

Small perhaps, under the circumstances, but containing a dozen rooms where a dozen subjects, relating to the surrounding totality, are delivered forth.

And then at the sounding heart, the voices of dramatic theater, or your special vibrant professor, or your teaching-tool cinema, repeating in yet other forms, the truth collided with on your way around or on your way in.

An architecture, in sum, it seems to me, as marvelous as those rounded self-encircling nautilus shells found along the shores of our seas.

Easy to build? In the mind, yes. With glass, brick, stone, and mortar? Difficult. And expensive.

But if finally blueprinted, built and sent down the ways to ride the mid-oceanic grass of a California university garden, what a place to travel, wander, and stay. What a pomegranate experience. What an incredible womb, finally, in which to grow ideas and rear young and old children.

Will it be built between now and the century’s end? And in the one hundred years beyond, can it be the most imaginative teaching hearth ever built to warm our minds?

I say it can be done.

I wish it to be so.